In March 1975, Carol Jerrems made
what would become her most famous photograph. ‘Vale Street’ shows Jerrems’s friend Catriona Brown standing in front of Mark Lean and Jon Bourke, teenage boys from Heidelberg Technical School where Jerrems was teaching at the time. The photograph, taken in the backyard of a house at 52 Vale Street, St Kilda, comes from a series of pictures that show the three subjects socialising, smoking and, under the direction of Jerrems, gradually disrobing. Jerrems carefully set up and managed this now-iconic image, which quickly came to personify the optimism and ambitions of countercultural and feminist politics of the time.
‘Vale Street’ is one of the most iconic photographs in Australian photography and extremely rare. MGA holds one of eight known prints from the edition of nine. Other prints from the edition are held by the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Horsham Regional Art Gallery.
(2014)
Gelatin silver prints are black-and-white photographic prints that have been created using papers coated with an emulsion of gelatin and light-sensitive silver salts. After the papers are briefly exposed to light (usually through a negative), a chemical developer renders the latent image as reduced silver, which is then fixed and washed. This technique was first introduced in the 1870s and is still used today. Most twentieth-century black-and-white photographs are gelatin silver prints. They are known for being highly detailed and sharply defined prints with a distinguishable smooth, even image surface.
