About

Judith Ahern has been making photographs for over thirty years. Her practice includes work in the mediums of black and white photography, color photography, alternative processes and video art. . In her photographic work she has explored notions of documentary practice, photographing in the diverse contexts of Las Vegas, Death Valley, Disneyland, Paris, Tamworth and Nashville. Ahern has exhibited her work at galleries and museums in Australia (including the National Gallery, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Noosa Regional Art Gallery, Australian Center for Photography), and overseas (White Columns, New York; Cite Gallery, Paris; Chisenhale Gallery, London; and Circulo des bellas Arts, Madrid. She has lectured on photography at Universities in Australia and has been a freelance contributor of journalism to the Canberra Times and Photofile.

The first extensive body of work for which Judith Ahern gained recognition was the photographic project documenting Tamworth’s Country Music Festival, a festival that celebrates the Australian Country and Western ethos. Ahern lived and studied in the United States for a period in the 1990’s and completed and exhibited several bodies of photographic work, including ‘The Real World’, ‘Live Simply’, ‘Nashville’ and ‘Unidentified Hostesses’. Other later series include: ‘Trout’, documenting life in a small regional Australian town,  ‘In the Garden’, photographs depicting English gardens and  ‘Britney Is A Slapper’, a series of color prints showing details of life in the outer suburbs of London. The platinum palladium series ‘After Atget’ revisits the sites that Atget photographed in Paris in the early 1900’s.

Visual Anthropology: The photographs of Judith Ahern

Terence Maloon once described Judith Ahern as a ‘visual anthropologist’. This offers a useful way of thinking about Ahern’s photographic practice of the last 13 years because it can be seen as a study of humankind, especially its societies and customs. Ahern’s is not a broad sweeping study, however. It is confined to particular kinds of customs and rituals found in Australia and the United States. They are enacted in full view in very ordinary places, including concert halls, restaurants, streets, and, more recently, casinos.

Ahern’s role incorporates some of the professional detachment of an anthropologist. She is not a full or un-selfconscious participant in the events she photographs. As a photographer, one with a press pass, she has a different kind of license. It facilitates access to stars and celebrities like John Cage, the experimental composer and musician; poet Allen Ginsberg; and writer William Burroughs. At a country music concert in Nashville, Tennessee, it enables her to take up a position in the press pit where she can direct her attention to the audience as well as to the stage where the stars perform.

This distance between Ahern and her subject matter is framed by her longstanding commitment to documentary photography and to photojournalism. In the mid-1980s, she worked for Panache magazine and has also been a photographer for The Sydney Morning Herald. Ahern is not interested in glamorising what she sees. Indeed, her images of stars and celebrities have the opposite effect, serving to prick fame’s balloon. There is nothing at all charismatic about Cage, Burroughs, and Ginsberg as she portrays them.

As a documentarian, Ahern is especially interested in mass public gatherings and behaviour. She is drawn to festivals, street parades, a welcome home for an Olympian, concerts and the like, returning to some events a number of times. The Country Music Festival at Tamworth, for example, she photographed over a five-year period. She has made return visits to Disneyland and to Las Vegas as well.

One can see Ahern’s visual anthropology at work in the numerous images of seemingly unrelated paraphernalia, such as children's clothes, under-stair bits and pieces at a house in Glebe, and items for sale at auctions in Albury. These photographs are not so much of objects as of ‘things’, invariably disconnected from their original owners and uses. Ahern comes across them pre-arranged, frozen in shop windows or laid out marooned on tables. They are arranged by the way she sees them.

In Ahern’s strongest work, this element of subtle transformation is most apparent. It is achieved through a variety of means, beginning with the selection of subject matter that has in it a seed of tackiness. Ahern’s recognition of what has become her trademark material may well be intuitive, but the means of representing it are probably less so. They reveal her familiarity with and debt to a stream of American documentary photography, especially the work of Robert Frank and Diane Arbus. Ahern’s early tribute to Lee Friedlander can be seen in her self-portrait from 1983, while the rodeo line-up at Tamworth can be seen as a homage to Frank. Details in the Nashville series of photographs have a heightened reality, an effect Arbus achieved by honing in on her subjects and eliminating distracting backgrounds (as in her famous Boy Waiting to March in a Pro-War Parade, New York City, 1967).

One of the most pivotal elements of Ahern’s photographic vocabulary is the angle of view, which she often subtly distorts. In the Nashville photographs, she made great use of the upward-looking angle gained from her position in the press pit. This viewpoint, like the close-up, which she also used to great advantage, is generally unflattering. Imperfections like bad teeth or flawed skin tend to be exaggerated. The use of flash underscores these effects.

Another critical element is scale. Ahern frequently renders her subject slightly larger than life-size so that they are a little too big and a little too close for comfort. The viewer cannot escape the accurate, often tacky details offered up by the photographic surface. In the Live Simply series taken in the Disneyland homes of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, all the things photographed are represented brighter than reality. Their materiality is emphasised in over-lush detail, their tawdry cuteness almost hyper-real.

Colour is also a crucial ingredient of Ahern’s work. While the selection in this exhibition is oriented towards black and white, Ahern has always worked in both black and white and colour, displaying a particular mastery of the latter. Again, she prefers to exaggerate its effects, achieving a rich artificiality with Fuji colour paper (she makes her prints in New York).

Ahern’s photography is centred on people, whose presence or absence animates the image. However, early this year she took a series of photographs at Zabriskie Point in the United States. In these images, nature resembles a movie set—an image of an image of a spectacular landscape—rather than the landscape itself. The scene appears too expansive, too extraordinary to be real. The landscapes taken in West Albury in the last few years introduce a different dimension. They are quiet, dark, and peculiarly detached images. Houses are small, seen from a medium distance; no people, no objects, no activities are around to energise the frame. A sense of dislocation is conveyed, inviting comparison with the work of the photographer Max Pam, who, returning from Asia in the mid-1980s after years spent living abroad, struggled to find an appropriate subject in his new environment.

In contrast to the landscapes, a second series of photographs taken in Albury engages with people and events.

The linkages between Judith Ahern’s disparate photographs of the last thirteen years are obvious in this exhibition. Ahern emerges as a believer in photography’s ability to capture ‘life’—that is, how people live and what is important to them. It is this belief in the truth and the value of compiling evidence that distinguishes her photographic practice as visual anthropology.

Helen Ennis, ANU, Canberra School of Art, June 1997
Copyright Helen Ennis 2025