Curator’s paragraph: Eliza Gregory

Full disclosure: I designed the project Gemma-Rose Turnbull began in 2018 at Wave Pool. Cal invited me to do a project, and we proposed one that was accepted to FotoFocus, and I invited Gemma to be my collaborator because I love to work with her, and we’ve been thinking together about social-practice based photography since 2011. However, when the time came to do the project I was pregnant with my daughter and too sick to travel, so Gemma gamely did it all solo. And wow did she make something amazing. 

The final form it takes is all from the mind of Gemma: The Camp Washington Capsule is a 500-page book and a digital archive that provide a fragmented, non-comprehensive snapshot of the Camp Washington neighborhood and the Wave Pool community in 2018 through words and pictures. Gemma conducted interviews, made portraits, solicited old photos through social media, gathered newspaper clippings, grabbed flyers, attended neighborhood meetings…the list goes on. And with this work, the tenderness is everywhere. It’s evident in the care with which she spoke to people and asked questions and listened. You see it in the attention she gave to fragments of ephemera. It’s there in the way she recorded and categorized and archived material. Like Erina Alejo’s work, there’s an aspect of translation here–translating the stuff of now into a format that can be discoverable as “the past” in a variety of futures. Gemma enacted tenderness toward people, places and things; toward the past, present and future; even toward the archive and the image as forms by recognizing both what they can and cannot accomplish. She created space. She built a structure in which the neighborhood could represent itself, tell its own story, and then find and retell and change that story again whenever it wants to. 

This is a project that treats the photograph as a raw material–something to begin an artwork with, a mechanism that begins a story which in turn helps shape a place. It rewrites all the rules of subject/object/audience/artist and allows the subjects to have the objects and be the audience as well as the artists–without pretending that a professional artist was never involved. It pushes back against the idea that an artist is somehow automatically above or outside of the community they are representing–it erases whole chunks of hierarchy and mythology about what artists are and who can be one. Regardless of the fact that Gemma doesn’t live in Camp–she in fact lives on a farm with her partner and dogs and chickens in Australia–and was an “outsider” in many ways, the way in which the project was structured positioned her as the “gatherer” (and documenter and editor and reporter and designer!) but it didn’t elevate those roles above the people who contributed that which was gathered. You can tell from the interviews that she’s getting bossed around as much as she’s also influencing where the conversation goes. That’s hugely important about this work–there is tenderness in looking, and there is tenderness in seeing many sides to something. As Carla Williams’ work teaches us, when you can see the good, the bad, the funny and the boring, you know you’re making room for a whole self.