I have never seen any copies of Doug Spowart’s Photo.Graph that was published in the 1990s or the earlier News Sheet apart from a post on the Brisbane Photography Scene 1993 written by Ian Poole on the wotwedid blog that Spowart runs with Victoria Cooper. It’s a pity because Photo.Graph was designed to fill a gap in the discussion, critique and commentary about a segment of the photography discipline within Australia.
Poole is a familiar figure in photographic culture because he is a cross over between an advertising /commercial photographer (20 years) and an exhibiting art photographer. Familiar in the sense that art photography in the 1970s and 1980s was kicked started by advertising /commercial photographer starting to teach at art schools and private photography schools. Athol Smith and John Cato in Melbourne are good examples of this figure. Poole is different to them in that he had a post-graduate degree in visual arts from Griffith University. So he is well placed to assess Brisbane photography in the early 1990s.
The article is starting point for a discussion about Queensland contemporary art photo practice and its a survey of events by the individual commercial and art photographers working in Brisbane and Queensland in 1993 –their exhibitions, travels, plans and books– just over a decade before the formation of the Queensland Centre of Photography. One of the photographers mentioned by Poole was Marion Drew. Others were Carl Warner and Richard Stringer. All are currently practising. What the article indicates is that photography was flourishing in the city of Brisbane in the early 1990s under the Labor government of Wayne Goss. The corruption that had gone on so long under a National Party Government of Bjelke-Petersen in the Moonlight State was in the past. Brisbane was no longer a big country town.