Inferno, Nympea oil rig, Bass Straight
Wolfgang Sievers is best known for the black-and-white photographs of modern Australian industry he made in the decades following the Second World War. His heroic photographs of Australian post-war industry and trade are characterised by their dramatic lighting and an elegant clarity of form. This aesthetic was closely linked to Sievers’s Bauhaus-inspired belief in social progress being achieved through pure functional beauty. By the 1970s, however, Sievers’s adherence to these modernist ideals waned and his later works often acknowledged the toxicity and messy uncertainty of industrial enterprise.
Sievers’s photograph of the Nympea oil rig is an example of his late career work. Shot with a hand-held camera, using a long exposure, Sievers has capitalised on the theatrical attributes of nocturnal photography. Sievers himself described the scene captured in this image as being like a grand finale to a fantastic, dramatic opera.
(2014)
Chromogenic prints are printed on paper that has at least three emulsion layers containing invisible dyes and silver salts. Each emulsion layer is sensitive to a different primary colour of light (red, green or blue). The development process converts the hidden dyes to visible colour depending on the amount of light it was exposed to. This type of paper is commonly used to print from colour negatives or digital files to produce a full-colour image. It can also be used to print black-and-white images, giving softer grain and less contrast than gelatin silver prints. Commonly known as c-type prints, chromogenic processing was developed in the 1940s and widely used for colour printing, including for domestic snapshots. While recent years have seen this process accompanied by ink-jet and digital printing technologies, chromogenic printing still remains in use to this day.
