Ruth Maddison
Ruth Maddison | Australia b.1945 | image from Christmas holiday with Bob's family, Queensland, 1978 (1978-79) | Gelatin silver photograph, hand-coloured on paper ed. 4/5 | Purchased 1995. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
During the 1970s, Feminism significantly altered the existing relationships between artists and audiences in Australian photography. Practitioners such as Ruth Maddison placed a new emphasis on lived experience and personal expression, working to destabilise accepted images of women and to counter the ‘fine print’ tradition promoted at the time by many supporters of documentary photography.
Maddison, a self-taught photographer, was one of the foremost exponents of hand-coloured photographs in the 1970s and early 1980s. This series of hand-coloured images demonstrates the consciously intimate and relaxed side of documentary photography that became prominent at this time.
In December 1978, she and her partner, Bob Daly, stayed at his parents’ house at Mermaid Beach, Queensland, for three weeks. Maddison took many photographs documenting this holiday period which, after editing, became the series Christmas holiday with Bob’s family, Queensland, 1978.
Maddison uses the family as her subject in a diaristic sequence of hand-coloured individual prints. These photographs convey her membership of the family, evident in the ease with which her subjects appear before her camera, while the hand-colouring accentuates the presence of the artist. Maddison, who is of Russian Jewish descent, grew up in an extended family which, she maintains, explains her obsessive exploration of Australian popular culture.
As she has said:
I see an individual’s life as being immensely rich and deep and complex, and everyone a mixture of ordinary and extraordinary. From my first roll of film I wanted to photograph people.
