Roderick McNicol, born in Melbourne in 1946, moved to Paris in late 1968 and experienced the aftermath of the protests against capitalism, consumerism, American imperialism and traditional institutions. Far-left student occupations faced heavy police repression which sparked action by trade unions in wildcat strikes of 11 million workers, or 22% of the French population. McNicol joined  café theatre performances and theatre collectives like Polish director Jerzy Grotowski’s purist, stripped-back ‘Poor Theatre’’.

Returning after five years Rod enrolled as the oldest in his year, 1974, in Prahran College photography but, like Bill Henson, stayed only briefly; “I was a bit of a troubled young man in my own ways, but I spent a year there” but, as he told Alison Stieven-Taylor in 2014, he knew he’d locked onto an obsession with the the portrait;

“…and I was right. Three and a half decades later and I’m still there.”

While at Prahran he made important contacts and with Paul Cox and another Dutch-born photographer Ingeborg Tyssen and John F. Williams, founded The Photographers Gallery in Punt Rd. Sth Yarra that year. It represents an important contribution to the field since that gallery was, with Brummels, one of the first commercial photography galleries in Australia, flourishing in the hands of Bill Heimerman who took it over in partnership with Ian Lobb later that year. McNicol’s work has been shown continuously since his first show there in 1978, and internationally, and recently in a retrospective at MGA (now the Museum of Australian Photography) in 2014.

McNicol continued acting at the time associated with Paul Cox on director Zbigniew Friedrich’s film Apostasy, shot in the Labassa mansion (home also to Prahran alumni Greg Neville and Peter Johnson); McNicol was the lead actor with Juliet Bacskai, and Paul was stills photographer, shooting on his favoured Rollei medium format.

The philosophical film and its minimal action is backgrounded by the television coverage of the events of 11 November 1975, when after the 1974 double dissolution and a budgetary supply crisis, the radically reformist Gough Whitlam-led federal Labor government became the first (and only) government in Australian history to be dismissed by the Governor-General. Such was the political setting for the photography of the seventies.

In this hectic period of his life, Rod’s acting involved him in some publicity photography in which, even in a commercial application, we can detect an approach, bred in the theatre, that he was to bring to his life-long interest in the portrait.

At right is a publicity image with difference; instead of acting, as the protagonists of Apostasy do for Cox’s still, the cast of the Pram Factory play Dreamers of the Absolute, seen with the radical director Phil Motherwell, Carol Porter and Greig Pickhaver face the camera, impassive, in poses from which the sub-editor has taken a cue for the headline. McNicol prepared mugshots of the young Russian anarchists for on-stage projections as an integral part of the set and the action.

Their eschewing of posture speaks in the authentic Australian voice sought by the Pram Factory breakaway group Nightshift in which Rod was involved; a theatre, in Motherwell’s words, that had “the immediacy of a rock concert,” Brechtian in its direct statements in which “pretence was an ugly word,” a visceral theatre of ideas.

The casual pose of “artistic terrorist” Lindzee Smith in Rod’s portrait of the Nightshift founder likewise rejects the conventions of theatrical documentation and promotion.

A couple of months earlier, The Photographers’ Gallery had first featured McNicol’s work in New Australian Work, with Gerard Groenveld, Bill Henson, Vivienne Hale, David Ellis, Fiona Hall, Ian Cerchi, Stephen Roach, Penny Malone, Peter Charuk, John Adair, Jon Macmichael, Christine Cornish, Frank Busby, Greg Wayn, Rod Trinca, Paul Krieg, Geoff Strong, Wayne Fimeri and Sandy Edwards.

Rod’s first major show quickly followed at Brummels Gallery in a joint exhibition with Carol Jerrems.

Of the portraits exhibited, and with reference to the theatre promotion, in an interview for Australia’s National Portrait Gallery, he says;

“In those early days, even when I was working as an actor at the Pram Factory, I’d just had my first exhibition at Brummels, and…was [honing] my portraiture into a particular, quite personal structure …intrigued by some of the more stark, very direct portraits from…portraiture in the nineteenth century…which came from the slow shutter speeds. They had no alternative. There was no spontaneity possible. You had to sit still and look into the camera, and for long periods of time. I found that look into the camera so quietly intense.

“There was no periphery; it was a direct engagement into the lens, through the lens, through the photographer, to the person viewing; a really powerful, singular connection and that intrigued me much more than, say, trying to make…someone look good…or to construct the image…[In] my first show over in Brummels, I was working with the actors in the Pram Factory […] I started to systematically do portraits of my peers—fellow actors, writers, junkies…”

Although he’d quit Prahran, the head of department Athol Shmith, whose own portraits are, by contrast, theatrical, took him under his wing.

Here Rod, then thirty-two, poses for a self-portrait in the courtyard of Athol’s…

“…little duplex apartment in South Yarra […] I think I learned my history of photography through those visits. We’d sit in his little courtyard…chatting about the history of photography.

“He had bookshelves with many many photographic books that he allowed me to look through and borrow. So he was invaluable in helping me move forward.”

Amongst the pages of those books he encountered Walker Evans’ ‘mugshot’ of Allie Mae Burroughs, and the series of expressionless headshots of prisoners in Siegburg Prison made in collaboration between August Sander (who took numerous identity photographs for persecuted Jews) with his son Erich who was incarcerated in the Prison in 1934 as a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany, and who died there of untreated appendicitis shortly before he was to be released.

Adopting this ideosyncratic approach he photographed Athol, wearing his habitual navy reefer jacket and Windsor-knotted tie, in Paul Cox’s garden in Prahran with a background that recalls Shmith’s in his portrait of his wife Patricia (the fashion-model known as Bambi).

Rod employs the same foliar background for his portrait of Juliet Bacskai who makes herself part of the setting by buttonholing a gardenia from the hedge. Athol’s portrait, made (if the date inscribed on the print is correct) while he was still married to his first wife Yvonne Slater, frames Bambi in a garland vignette of ivy leaves, symbol of devotion and fidelity (they divorced ten years later).

While Athol works to create a stage-like depth and has his subject perform in her ambiguous pose, Rod’s aim is to flatten, not flatter, his subject. While both photographers are aware that soft frontal light beautifies the features and intensifies the gazes of the women looking into their lens, that is as far as Rod takes artfulness in his intention to represent the fact of photography in this formative series Permanent mirrors.

That title is well chosen; we come to mirrors expecting a specular likeness, a confirmation of our enduring identity, and like the faces descried from the whisp of mercury, like breath on glass, upon the daguerreotype’s silver surface, such proof of being defies time.

It is an essence that has taken McNicol a lifespan of practice to refine, a process which began with paring back the elements of the photograph;

“I was not looking to take a photograph, a portrait of someone as the quintessent portrait of that person. I was looking more to work in an essay form… a series of portraits, and that series would be what I would want to reflect rather than individual photographs of each particular person.”

In the 1970s Prahran students survived for their inspiration on a diet of American photographers, two of whom influenced McNicol. One was chronicler of fashion Irving Penn who, to make pictures for his 1974 Worlds In a Small Room abandoned his New York atelier for a small tent which served as his pop-up studio, setting it  on the edge of the Sahara, among gypsies in Spain, in the highlands of New Guinea, in the mountains of Nepal where, seeking the exotic in fashion he invited inhabitants to step, for a moment, out of their worlds and against its artfully mottled backdrop.

McNicol remarks that;

“of course he had the advantage that all of this was sponsored by Vogue, but I was impressed with this use of diffuse daylight and neutral background which I was seeking to do, and the subject looking directly back into the camera. There was a particular shot of Penn’s that I absolutely loved; it was a young Berber girl barely in her teens if that, and she was standing there with a little lamb around her shoulders with hind legs in one hand and the forelegs in the other, draped around her shoulders with this little frown, looking directly back into the camera. Such a beautiful image.”

The other photographer to whom he looked was Richard Avedon who in Portraits 1947–1977, published 1978, was;

“using a plain white background, photographing [celebrities] in New York. With the arrogance of the young, enthusiastic thing, I was critical … of both these bodies of work. Avedon has to be photographing celebrity people, and … cramming the person up against the edge of the frame for effect. That annoyed me. With Irving Penn, although the work was very beautiful, …when he was photographing nubile African women, the way he draped them all together was a bit too designer for me..”

A loft in Fitzroy similar to the various locations in New York of Andy Warhol’s Factory served Nightshift for rehearsal and the odd performance, and at the end of the play Dreamers of the Absolute in which Rod acted, Lindzee Smith left to go back to New York and Rod took over the space and has since occupied it as his studio and accommodation;

“…it’s one of those places with a lantern roof and those big square windows up top., so…beautifully flooded in daylight. There I set about creating this series of portraits… drawing from those around me.”

The subjects are shot sitting motionless in even, soft light against the painted brick render of his loft studio, and in each, the same blob of mortar appears to the right of each head;

“…in making these portraits, I’d set up a situation in my studio that was really restricting the amount that my sitters could do. I used a hardback kitchen chair…there’s only one way to sit. I was happily using a slow shutter speed because the particular skylight I was using dictated that, which harks back to the 19th century. I really liked slowing the process down. I wasn’t seeking to be capturing spontaneity or projection or anything like that and was…framing each one in exactly the same way…quite a paring back of the process.”

His realisation that with this process the portraits had become more like mugshots, was coincidental with an exhibition in early 1981 at Melbourne University called The Suspect Image, curated by Italian artist Giorgio E. Colombo who in 1978 wrote of “the impossible certainty of the body,” with work from the Italian Consulate; a collection of photographs by Cesare Lombroso, 19th-century who purported to identify criminal tendencies using the pseudoscience of phrenology.

He remembers the subject of this portrait;

“Brunswick Street in those days was a very different place, with only one or two cafes, Bakers and and Rhumbarallas,. When you saw Carol wafting aloofly into Rhumbarallas, she was like a vision. She also had a job as door bitch on a nightclub on Smith Street, and believe me, no one got past Carol if she didn’t want them to get into the club.

Rod didn’t seek out celebrity as Avedon did, but inevitably some friends went on to become quite well-known, like minimalist painter Robert Hunter and photographer Polixeni Papapetrou.

Restricting his subject’s movements so that they could not ‘perform’, Rod realised was ‘ruthless’ but he wanted to be ‘ruthless in a gentle way,’ just as in 1938 Lincoln Kirstein described as ‘cruel and tender’ his contemporary Walker Evans’ portraits ;

“So, why was I paring portraiture back to this bare essence, producing images that were in no way trying to convey normal notions of inner character or expressions of individual personality traits; all the usual tropes for portraiture? By removing these constructs, the better to engage directly with the sitter, I was seeking to evoke anew something that had been diluted over time, something that had been obscured by familiarity and the sheer volume of imaging available. Namely, that haunting spectre of time that lies quietly inherent in all photography itself. And time always hints at mortality. I remember in Roland Barthes’ wonderful little book called in English editions Camera Lucida, he says that haunting spectre of mortality lies within photography.”

This series at last consisted of about 30 photographs and was exhibited in 1986 in Melbourne at the United Artists Gallery with Anna (then Rhys) Schwartz, and Luba Bilu, then also that year in Poland, which was  then under the Jaruzelski regime, so to an audience feeling the stirrings of freedom and solidarność, their reaction to these austere photographs was ambivalent. In 1987 they was shown in Paris, where they received more positive response due to the awareness in France of the 19th century work to which the images refer.

However, 1986 brought the unexpected death of Rod’s mother just before he left for Paris, where he received a call that his father who was dealing with emphysema, was dying, necessitating a trip back to Australia. 18 months later he took up a residency in the Cancer Ward of the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital working alongside the palliative care team. His subjects were facing their own mortality;

“…the concept of time there [was represented] with some of the patients’ photographs of themselves as children. I’d reproduce that image and then come back and do a photograph of them holding that photo of themselves as a young person in front of themselves, only in a matter of weeks before they were to die.

“That was a haunting, difficult time for me but an extremely rewarding one too but I came away from that and the loss of my parents feeling I needed to take a break from photography. I also confess about this time when postmodernism was being touted as the only way to go, I wanted a bit more pluralism…”

Rod moved away and began a long break from photography finding consolation in another passion; equestrian riding and dressage; “…there’s no  better way of getting through grief than cantering your horse through a track in the forest on a rainy day with tears streaming down your face.”

He returned to photography in 1998, to the young subculture whom he found opposite his studio at the headquarters of Friends of the Earth and congregating in the health food store Soul Food. For the first time, he had to approach strangers on the street; a challenge given his inherent reticence;

“One day as I left my studio … there were three of these feral people; Aroarah was one of them Meg was another—the three them sitting there….exactly the sort of subjects I wanted to make a transition into colour—what more vibrant sense of colour can you have than these? As I’m going past these girls, I couldn’t bring myself to stop and speak to them. Not only was I shy, I’m also a man of a certain age, and I’m approaching young women; so a difficult situation.

“So I keep on walking, and I’m cursing myself; ‘walk back and if they’re still there you must stop and talk to them.’ I do that, and I see them still sitting. And what do I do? I walk past them again! So I turn left into Soul Food and try to gather my breath. One of them walked in. Finally I managed to go up to her and mumble my case. They did come to my studio, and fortunately my studio is such that you walk in there and you know I’m not some sort of sleaze.

“They all agreed to come back, and I had such a good time doing these portraits with these young Eco Warriors as they were at the time, up protecting the forests from logging. I just loved the way they presented themselves, a rip here, a tear there, a bit of lace, a thing through the nose. In fact Meg said to me; ‘I want to just check something – you don’t have anything to do with fashion do you?’ I said ‘No I don’t.’ She said ‘we’ve got to be careful because fashion copies us you know.’ so I thought ‘fair point’.”

Rod called the series Portraits from Last Century because it was about a decade before he actually exhibited the work, and because he perceived in them a timelessness and medieval or tribal quality.

McNicol acknowledges his fascination with Sue Ford’s Time Series which he first encountered  in 1974 at Brummels Gallery for which she photographed her friends 10 years apart and placed the images together. He envisioned a fascinating time series using the directness and formal structure of his own portraits. One of these is a venture into digital printing; the images 20 years apart of painter Robert Hunter against the same backdrop of Rod’s loft, which won major portrait prize the Australian Photographic Portrait Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Daily Telegraph reviewer Elizabeth Fortescue wrote that it was among the quietest but most intriguing finalists;

“The result is one of those fascinating juxtapositions which invite the curious eye to flick between the two images, monitoring and comparing, searching for evidence of time having passed. Hunter might look a bit streetwise in the photograph. In reality, he is shy, according to an old friend, Michael Wardell”

Significantly as regards the backdrop, Fortescue mentions that in the ’70s Hunter stopped painting on canvas and restricted himself to painting “to order” — directly on to the walls of his patrons as “a protest against the commercialisation of the object”.

Another of his subjects from this time series was close friend and fellow actor from the Pram Factory days, Jack Charles (5 September 1943 – 13 September 2022), Boon Wurrung, Dja Dja Wurrung, Woiwurrung and Yorta Yorta Elder, activist, stage and screen actor, musician and artist, and survivor of the Stolen Generations who, motivated by his own experiences, advocated for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people caught up in the prison system.  One of Rod’s many portraits of Uncle Jack won the 2012 National Photographic Portrait Prize.

Contacting further subjects from his original series  and taking advantage of having the same wall as background, and by framing them identically, the inherent trace of time in photography brought together these moments, separated by two decades in the continuum of people’s lives, so that the series was able to foreground the aging process, mortality, and the passage of time.

Robert Nelson, partner of Poli Papapetrou (portrayed above), in reviewing in May 2005 McNicol’s Portraits from my village at Watson Place Gallery, asks why McNicol’s portraits are “so confronting,” and answers his own question with reference to Bernd and Hilla Becher disciple Thomas Ruff, 12 years younger than Rod, who since 1981 worked with a ‘mug-shot’ approach, but who enlarged his portraits massively beyond life-size to 2 metres tall;

“Irrespective of age, McNicol’s subjects in some sense look to the other side, to the image of death, which theorists have long associated with photographic images. I don’t see a counterpart to this fatal sentiment in the work of Thomas Ruff or other international photographers. It’s something older, but new again.”

Fellow alumnus from his year Andrew Chapman recently portrayed him in his daylight studio loft to reveal the tragedy of his affliction, so cruel in a photographer, with glaucoma in one eye and macular degeneration in both, also facing the termination of his lease from his lifelong studio as developers are wanting to move in.

Despite all this, Rod is able to continue working, albeit a little slower than before.

McNicol’s work has won prizes including the Australian Photographic Portrait Prize (2004 and 2006 and finalist in 2007 and 2010); the Olive Cotton Portrait Prize (2005 and 2008); and amongst many national and international shows, Memento Mori
: Rod McNicol
 was exhibited at Monash Gallery of Art (now Museum of Australian Photography) in 2014

, and in the National Portrait Gallery exhibitions Reveries: Photography and Mortality (2007) and Life and Time: Portraits by Rod McNicol (2015).

[NOTE: Many of Rod’s statements quoted here are from my transcription of the presentation he gave at Fitzroy Town Hall on 11 July 2023, and I am indebted to Aimee Board for her excellent article on McNicol at the National Portrait Gallery, where more images and information on him can be found. J.McA]