Suellen Symons

Carnival 

Whilst in Europe on an Australia Council grant in 1991-1993 I became interested in researching where the imagery of women came from in contemporary times from more ancient times, where our symbolism comes from. I began studying the processions and the Palios that were staged throughout Europe especially with pageantry and theatricality. I stayed all over Italy in the tiny villages following the processions and the seasons.

In Paris I stayed in the Cite Internationale des Arts and after a year in 91 Quai de la Gare where the French and Italian artists worked. I studied in the libraries in Europe and tried to master languages. My camera of choice was a Mamiya 6X7 inches with a Manfrotto tripod heavy enough to stabilise the camera in the fiercest of European winters. I travelled with hundreds of rolls of medium format black and white film in my luggage and even on my back as I scaled the Dolomites to the peak in order to photograph vistas and the symbolism I saw everywhere. (I never even thought of hiring a car, everywhere I travelled was by public transport, bicycle in Paris, or foot to save every penny I could to prolong my investigation.)

John Docker wrote a book called “Carnival” which I discovered in my local in history library once back in Sydney. I invited him to see my work and here is an extract from what he wrote forPhotofile 45:

 “ Carnival in Italy, as shaped in these images involved tableau after tableau of rich theatricality elaborate traditional costuming and rituals, suggestions of extended visual narratives. The faces are absorbed in various dramas and stories, faces of an operatic seriousness, engaged with ‘Italy’ as multilayered with tradition and history.

Italy might be static in its traditionality, a present crumbling into its parts, compared to the bold Parisiennes running through the streets the French students as modernity itself, fascinated with America as freedom from stifling pasts and encrusted presents, challenging the older generations to make way for the new and innovative. The young women in the Italy photographs were, by contrast, in the midst of traditional performances, as with Maids of Springin Camerino, dressed in white costumes. There were photographs of a young woman twice posing with powerful theatricality.

….There was the remarkable photograph of an apartment building in Venice looking like a crazy tower of Babel. A clock tower, also in Venice,  looks, or at least so liminal, between Europe and the Continent. Then a building with its plaster crumbling, revealing the bricks beneath, Italy as saturated with historicity, a palimpsest, visually startling, almost overwhelming….”

Work from Europe: France Italy and Great Britain

50 silver gelatine prints hand printed by Suellen Symons

Stills Gallery Paddington September-October 1995