Martyn Jolly
Martyn Jolly is an artist and a writer. He completed his PhD, on fake photographs and photographic affect, at the University of Sydney in 2003. He has written on the photographic archive in relation to history, memory and contemporary photography, as well as issues surrounding public space, privacy and new technology. He continues to write reviews and essays.
As an artist Jolly engages with history, memory, experience and belief by reconsidering, recontextualizing and reframing details from photographs found either in archives or in the mass media. The photographic installation Wonderful Pictures in Colour (1994) draws on Australian picture books of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, 1963: News and Information (1998) uses details cut from some of the three thousand photographs taken for the News and Information Bureau during 1963, and Faces of the Living Dead (2001) features a series of cropped and digitally enhanced spirit photographs taken in the 1920s by Ada Deane. Jolly’s ACT Bushfire Memorial (2006), completed in collaboration with Tess Horwitz and Tony Steel, comprises five glass columns containing three hundred snapshots of the fire and its effects that were provided by the community.
(Martyn Jolly 2006)
