Other ways of seeing: Ella Dreyfus’s ‘Under Twenty-Seven’ at Bondi Pavilion Gallery

Under Twenty-Seven, exhibition installation view, Watt Space Gallery, University of Newcastle, May 2019; image courtesy the artist

Ella Dreyfus’s powerful and yet subtle artworks ask us to think about what is at stake in the gaze of the adult viewer when confronted with the spectacle of boys growing into young men. She asks us to pause and think about not only what we see, but what we want to see.

Images of children and young people are highly politically charged these days. We are living through a long-deserved reckoning about the sexual and physical abuse of minors. We are witnessing a calling to account of some of our most revered institutions and authority figures.

This reckoning has created a climate of enormous anxiety around images of children, as Dreyfus knows all too well. A high watermark of this alarm was in 2008 when artist Bill Henson was accused of paedophilic instincts for his hauntingly staged images of young people on the cusp of puberty. Even though she only photographed her young male subjects naked from the waist up, Dreyfus has also dealt with a host of strong emotional reactions to her portraits: from last-minute parental sanctions on exhibiting them to public commentary.

Throughout her oeuvre Dreyfus has challenged the lens through which we see bodies and asks us to reflect on why certain ones are either invisible or actively censored. As Jacqueline Millner suggested in her 2005 catalogue essay for ‘Under Twelve’, the first suite of works in Dreyfus’s current series, it is the relationship between subject and object that goes to the heart of the trouble that animates concerns over images of children and young people. Are they subjects or objects of our gaze? What is the relationship between our desire to protect and our impulse to control?

What this remarkable new suite of works presents us with is the opportunity to reflect on the evolution of the young men who originally sat for these images 14 years ago and, in turn, to reflect on our own subjectivity as viewers. The changes in the bodies and the gazes of the subjects of the portraits are not only striking but strikingly different. It is tempting to read across them in a linear fashion: to use the changes in their gazes and poses as evidence of a particular relationship to emergent masculinity. But that would be to fix them in our imagined world of the transition from child to adult. And that is exactly what Dreyfus asks us to consider.

Images have a capacity to remind us as much about what we can’t see as what we do. Photographs are always framed in multiple ways: by the photographer’s lens, by cropping or digital alteration or by the subjective gaze of the viewer. What Dreyfus asks us to notice in these quietly eloquent portraits is precisely this. She reminds us that when we look, there are always other ways of seeing and that, ultimately, it is impossible to fix the object of our vision with our gaze.

Catharine Lumby, Sydney

This text originally appeared as part of a longer essay accompanying Ella Dreyfus’s exhibition ‘Under Twenty-Seven’, currently on view at Sydney’s Bondi Pavilion Gallery until 3 November.