# data[].attributes.headline
Justine Varga, 'Maternal Line'. Winner of the Olive Cotton Award for photographic portraiture 2017.

# data[].attributes.subject
Justine Varga, 'Maternal Line'. Winner of the Olive Cotton Award for photographic portraiture 2017.

# data[].attributes.body
Image: Justine Varga, Maternal Line, 2017, chromogenic hand-printed photograph, 153 cm x 125 cm framed. Courtesy the artist and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide

# data[].attributes.headline
Olive Cotton Award 2019 Conditions of entry

# data[].attributes.subject
Olive Cotton Award 2019 Conditions of entry

# data[].attributes.body
Take a read of these rules and see if you can find anything that would have disqualified Varga's 'Maternal line' in 2017

# data[].attributes.headline
Do you think 'Maternal line' pushes the boundaries of what constitutes a photograph? Do you agree with the judge's decision? Why or why not?

# data[].attributes.subject
Do you think 'Maternal line' pushes the boundaries of what constitutes a photograph? Do you agree with the judge's decision? Why or why not?

# data[].attributes.body
If you close your eyes and imagine a loved one, I can almost guarantee that the impression you will find won’t be crisp and clear; it will be muffled and somewhat muted, just a memory of a gesture or the sound of a laugh; yet somehow you know it is them. My photography seeks to evoke this kind of sensation.

# data[].attributes.headline
Is this image really a portrait? Controversy and the Olive Cotton Award by North Sullivan

# data[].attributes.subject
Is this image really a portrait? Controversy and the Olive Cotton Award by North Sullivan

# data[].attributes.body
Whatever lines Ms Varga and Dr Lakin have sought to challenge, one thing is clear, the winning entry is almost certainly not the work of Ms Varga, but that of her aged and vulnerable grandmother.

# data[].attributes.body
Exhibition Catalogue PDF

# data[].attributes.headline
Should Justine Varga's grandmother be given the prize money?

# data[].attributes.subject
Should Justine Varga's grandmother be given the prize money?

# data[].attributes.body
Kimberlee Weatherall, a professor and associate dean at the University of Sydney law school, said the owner of the prize-winning work was Varga's grandmother, either solely or jointly with her granddaughter.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Justine Varga's prize-winning portrait has provoked controversy. Credit:Wolter Peeters

"I believe there is a very real concern that Ms Varga has misappropriated her vulnerable grandmother's copyright in a work the old lady reportedly created, at Ms Varga's behest, using pens, crayon and spit on a sheet of plastic film," he said. .

Varga told Fairfax Media the artwork was created after she saw her grandmother sitting at the kitchen table with a jar of pens, testing each of them with a scribble.

"I set her up and I asked her to inscribe her mark onto the sheet of negatives," she said. "I also asked her to use her saliva in the process as well."

"And then I hand print the photograph with my printer in the darkroom so once again it becomes a double inscription," she said. "There is no separation between the subject and the materials."

Justine Varga's Maternal Line features scrawls made by her grandmother onto a piece of film. Credit:Stephen Oxenbury

Varga did not respond to Fairfax Media's request for further comment.

Sullivan, who shot the Qantas advertisement of the choir on the Great Wall of China, suggested Varga's work did not meet the entry requirements for the award because it was created by her grandmother.

"The act of reproducing a work, in whatever form, does not in itself constitute its creation and does not entitle the person making the reproduction to claim copyright over the work," he said. "In just the same way that a person who prints a photographer's negative in the darkroom cannot claim to have created the work and own the copyright."

He added: "Nor does Ms Varga's apparent directions given to her grandmother or the provision of the materials used by the grandmother to create the work entitle Ms Varga to own the image that resulted."

Kimberlee Weatherall, a professor and associate dean at the University of Sydney law school, said the owner of the prize-winning work was Varga's grandmother, either solely or jointly with her granddaughter.

"Either way, Ms Varga would need to secure an assignment of ownership in order to own copyright, which would need to be in writing," she said. "Although if the grandmother intended to transfer ownership to Ms Varga, a court might recognise her ownership claim and order that a transfer be signed."

The eligibility requirements for the Olive Cotton Award stipulate that an entry is "owned and created by the artist".

"I don't know what an artist would have to do to claim to be the creator in artistic terms," Professor Weatherall said. "In copyright law terms, Ms Varga would likely need to establish that she entirely controlled the expression - deciding what would be done on the page and where.

"But of course, it would then be much harder to argue that it was a portrait of her grandmother since the basis for that claim is that the expression was in fact her grandmother's."

Professor Weatherall also said that merely reproducing a work did not make a person its author.

"You have to contribute original expression to the artistic work to be an author," she said. "That would require, in this case, in some way changing the scrawls, or how they were presented on the page, or re-colouring the entire thing, or adding an entirely different background."

Not since the NSW police raided a 2008 exhibition of works depicting naked children by photographer Bill Henson, has a photo sparked such an intense debate.

Hate mail has also been sent to the prize's judge Shaune Lakin, a curator of photography at the National Gallery of Australia.

Ingrid Hedgcock, a curator at Tweed Regional Gallery, said the gallery stood by Dr Lakin's decision to award the $20,000 prize to Ms Varga's "very complex photographic portrait".

"The artist's methods are well established and are understood by her grandmother who greatly respects her granddaughter's practice and was a knowing participant in contributing to this work," she said. "The artist's conceptual, intellectual and emotional intention is vital in this process."

Ms Hedgcock suggested entrants in the prize would have made the decision to enter based on whether they believed Dr Lakin might favour their work: "As with any award the entrant pool varies from year to year, to some degree influenced by whether entrants perceive the judge will favour their working methods."

Polixeni Papapetrou, whose work My Ghost, a silkscreen portrait of her daughter Olympia, was highly commended, said some entrants in the prize were "shocked and disappointed" by the selection of Varga's work as winner.

Sullivan also questioned whether Varga's work met the entry requirement that required a "photographic" work.

"Personally, I can't accept a person's scrawls on a piece of film, as something other than a drawing, in the same way I do not accept David Hockney's drawings on his iPad as a photograph," he said. "I'm sure Mr Hockney would agree with me."

He added: "Can I draw, smear, scrawl or whatever on a sheet of fine art Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper and call it a photograph, simply on the basis it is the material my studio uses to print its photographs? I think it would be a long bow to draw."

Andrew Taylor is a Senior Reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Olive Cotton Award: Is it a photo? Is it a portrait? Should Justine Varga's grandmother be given the prize money?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"I believe there is a very real concern that Ms Varga has misappropriated her vulnerable grandmother's copyright in a work the old lady reportedly created, at Ms Varga's behest, using pens, crayon and spit on a sheet of plastic film," he said. .

# data[].attributes.body
This is the judge, Shaune Lakin's response to criticisms...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Recently I announced Justine Varga's Maternal Line as the winner of this year's Olive Cotton award for photographic portraiture.

Maternal Line is a beautiful photograph. Its purple and green palette has colours and smoky metallic effects I had never seen in a photograph before. Over this coloured ground is a series of marks (ranging from light blue to dirty brown, from thick to thin) that seem at once deliberate and nonsensical. These marks had been made with a range of pens and saliva by the artist's elderly Hungarian grandmother, in an intimate photographic exchange magically rendered in a large print.

It was a moving, melancholic experience: to witness a moment of significant emotional and cultural exchange between two women at such different points in their lives; to be left with a strong feeling for the subject's personality and - to quote Olive Cotton's daughter Sally McInerney - her soul. But I was also impressed by what I saw as the photograph's feminist response to the proposition of a photographic portrait: this portrait was created between women, using elements (scribble, saliva) associated with maternal intimacy. In the end, Maternal Line called itself out as the award's most ambitious portrait.

Almost immediately and consistently since then, the announcement generated what I still see as a disproportionate level of criticism. It attracted widespread online and print reporting across Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, the Unites States and China, with headlines invariably deriding the saliva and scribbles which were part of its development.

Running alongside these reports, and in many cases encouraged by them, were enormous levels of social media commentary. Closer to home, dozens of messages were sent to my work email critical of my decision, of Varga's photograph and its claims to the award. Many more were positive and supportive.

It has been a long time since a photograph or photography as a subject has created so much public discussion in Australia. It's certainly the first time contemporary Australian photography has made the front page of one of the major print dailies since an exhibition of Bill Henson's work was shut down by police in 2008.

At issue with both of these cases is the still widely held perception that contemporary artists in Australia, and those like me who work to promote and create audiences for their work, are disconnected from public opinion and, it seems, basic "professional" thresholds. As one emailer stated the case to me: "You have just alienated every serious working photographer in the country."

I expected the decision would be contentious and acknowledged this when I made the announcement at Tweed Regional Gallery. I completely understand how a photographic portrait that withholds from us the physical appearance of its subject might be a confounding proposition for some.

In spite of the fact photographic history is lined with examples of nonrepresentational portraits and self-portraits, there remains an expectation that photography's primary function is to witness the world and that a photographic portrait should show what its subject looked like.

And this is a subject (photographic portraiture) in which we all claim some level of investment, whether emotional, sentimental, commercial or otherwise. We now take and share such portraits at unprecedented levels. As a corollary, a range of professional and commercial imperatives work to protect the category and its conventions.

All the same, "photographic portraiture" is a wonderfully broad term and not one limited to what goes on in photographic studios, photojournalism, documentary photography or, for that matter, on Facebook. It is a term perfectly suited to Varga's photograph: it's a portrait of her grandmother made using photographic processes.

As well as questioning the work's claims to being a portrait, the critical commentary questioned whether it legitimately represented a photograph. The "photography" question turned on the fact that the work was made without a camera and that its image is apparently not a product of light. (We seem anxious to maintain a belief that photographic images are created by nature and science, not by the hand.)

But Maternal Line is profoundly photographic and to me was among the most "photographic" works shortlisted for this year's award. It was made using photographic film and complex photographic darkroom processes: it was handprinted chromogenically by sensitising photographic paper to wavelengths of light. At every turn, photographic processes and materials - including light - were used to bring this portrait to life.

The fact that Maternal Line is a cameraless photograph - that a camera was nowhere involved in its making - should not be controversial. To argue that photography requires a camera is to assert a very partial or selective view of the medium's history and its contemporary iterations - one that favours the idea of photography as technological observation rather than an embodied process.

My colleagues and I at the National Gallery of Australia look after one of the world's great photography collections, a collection which contains many pictures made without cameras. Indeed, photography is grounded in cameraless processes, just as it is in lens-based processes.

Cameraless contact-printed photographs have been there from the start, when during the 1830s Henry Fox Talbot made photogenic drawings and John Herschel cyanotypes. They have also been crucial to the history of avant-garde photography, whether as LászlóMoholy-Nagy's photograms or as the surrealist photographer Man Ray's Rayographs. In Australia during the 1930s, Max Dupain and Olive Cotton were interested in and experimented with the cameraless processes they came to know through their shared admiration of both Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray.

Maternal Lineknowingly and conscientiously draws on this history of process-based (as opposed to picture-based) photography, a history which has always understood the darkroom as a place of practice, experimentation and innovation. Lawyers and photographers who questioned the copyright ownership of Maternal Line are simply unaware of this. One photographer quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald completely misunderstands the significance of the printing process, which he reduced to "the act of reproducing a work", in this case one made by the artist's grandmother.

To argue that photography requires a camera is to assert a very partial or selective view of the medium's history

Shaune Lakin

Cotton, the woman after whom this great prize is named, would have understood all of this. The often breathtaking character of her prints reflects not just technical command but countless hours of darkroom experimentation. To assert, as one emailer did, that "Olive is rolling in her grave" is to greatly undermine Cotton's highly adventurous relationship to making and printing photographs.

As I also noted to those in attendance at the announcement of the award, I was throughout the judging process highly conscious of Cotton's contribution to what she understood as contemporary photography: she was there in both name and spirit.

There have been a lot of dubious claims made of the women involved in this story: that one of our great modernist photographers (whose legacy is firmly embedded in Maternal Line) maintained a fixed, conventional practice; that the "opportunistic" young photographer who conjured Maternal Lineshould have been "too ashamed" to collect the prize; that a "vulnerable ... old lady" was duped into scribbling and "drooling" on a sheet of photographic film.

All I can say, by way of reflecting on my participation in the prize, is how powerful I found this confluence of influence, ambition and collaboration in the experience of the print itself.

I'm happy the conversation has taken place and there are many positives that have come out of this, not least of which, of course, is that people are looking at contemporary Australian photography.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why I chose the 'spit and scribble' photograph: Olive Cotton judge on the global furore | Shaune Lakin

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Recently I announced Justine Varga's Maternal Line as the winner of this year's Olive Cotton award for photographic portraiture. Maternal Line is a beautiful photograph. Its purple and green palette has colours and smoky metallic effects I had never seen in a photograph before.

# data[].attributes.body
All the same, “photographic portraiture” is a wonderfully broad term and not one limited to what goes on in photographic studios, photojournalism, documentary photography or, for that matter, on Facebook. It is a term perfectly suited to Varga’s photograph: it’s a portrait of her grandmother made using photographic processes.

# data[].attributes.body
Maternal Line knowingly and conscientiously draws on this history of process-based (as opposed to picture-based) photography, a history which has always understood the darkroom as a place of practice, experimentation and innovation. Lawyers and photographers who questioned the copyright ownership of Maternal Line are simply unaware of this.

# data[].attributes.headline
Academic Martyn Jolly discusses 'Maternal line'

# data[].attributes.subject
Academic Martyn Jolly discusses 'Maternal line'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Look I don't want to add to the beat up, but jeez some ridiculous things are being said about Justine Varga's winning photograph for the Olive Cotton Portrait prize. Now a professor of Law at the University of Sydney is saying the chemical and light produced image of Justine Varga's grandmother's pen marks and spittle isn't authored by Varga but by her Grandmother. Does she know nothing of the history of, say, conceptual art (Lewitt: 'The idea becomes the machine that makes the art') or participatory art? This completely out of touch law professor thinks that 'expression' must lie in the perfunctory hand made mark (presumably because Shakespeare wrote his plays by hand?), not in the photographer's highly developed and thought through photographic process of indexical translation. Somebody else (responsible for the nausea we feel when we are landing in QANTAS planes) reckons it's not a photograph, even though at its core it is driven by light and chemistry and touch, the things that have been celebrated as the core of photography by photographic theorist since, oh, I don't know, 1839? Somebody else reckons its not a portrait of Varga's grandmother, even though all anybody has been talking about is - her grandmother! And even though, to return to our Sydney Law professor's valorisation of the hand in her misunderstanding of art authorship, we have all longbeen valorising and fetishising the hand made mark as a signature of the person.

Posted on . This entry was posted in Blog. Bookmark the permalink.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Look I don't want to add to the beat up, but jeez some ridiculous things are being said about Justine Varga's winning photograph for the Olive Cotton Portrait prize. Now a professor of Law at the University of Sydney is saying the chemical and light produced image of Justine Varga's grandmother's pen marks and spittle...

# data[].attributes.headline
Art controversy: hate-mail after grandmother's saliva wins $20,000 portrait prize

# data[].attributes.subject
Art controversy: hate-mail after grandmother's saliva wins $20,000 portrait prize

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Posted July 25, 2017 14:41:02

The winner of one of Australia's premier photographic-portrait prizes - a grandmother's scrawled pen marks and saliva on a piece of film - has sparked an outcry.

Some critics of the winner of the $20,000 Olive Cotton Award have accused the judge of simply wanting to create controversy.

Sydney artist Justine Varga's portrait of her grandmother has no face. Instead Ms Varga has used her grandmother's pen scrawls and streaks of her saliva to create the work, which she calls Maternal Line.

It scooped first prize in the competition run by the Tweed Regional Gallery at Murwillumbah in northern New South Wales.

''I wanted to somehow capture more of the essence of who she was and through the gesture of her mark and the trace of her hand," Ms Varga said.

"What I love about the way I've recorded my grandmother is that, in a way, it's timeless.

"She's not a young person or an elderly person. I've just captured actually her and for me when I look at that I have a direct connection to my grandmother, the person rather than the exterior of the person."

Hate mail and 'nasty feedback'

Judge Dr Shaune Lakin, a senior curator of photography at the National Gallery of Australia, said he had received aggressive feedback criticising his choice.

"I have received lots of hate mail actually, which has been actually really kind of disturbing," Dr Lakin said.

"It really does diminish what, for me, was a very complicated and complex process that I took very seriously and it was about the pictures and it was about the photography.

"I have received really nasty feedback from photographers, but a lot of vitriolic commentary that has come back to me has suggested that the decision was really just about creating controversy.

"It disrespects a gifted artist, it really does diminish what was a really complicated process and it was about the picture and photographs."

Dr Lakin said he had no doubt about the definition of 'portrait'.

"In the end I went with this photograph because I was convinced it had an emotional power I rarely see in photographs," he said.

"I was also quite convinced it was a portrait and a portrait that speaks about portraiture today.

"We live in an age today where we circulate photos online everyday, a portrait-rampant culture.

"For me, this portrait didn't deal with the appearance of somebody in the way a selfie phenomena does, for me it was like 'wow, this is a really contemporary portrait, and one that pushes the boundaries of portraiture at a time when the idea of taking a photograph of someone standing in front of you or turning a camera around and taking a photo of yourself and posting or sharing that is such a part of every day life.'"

Artist surprised

Ms Varga said she was surprised to win, but also about the reaction.

"I knew when I entered the award that it would be a long shot that I would be the recipient so when I was sitting there, it was really quite emotional. It was a very special moment," she said.

"In the history of art and portraiture, what I have entered is not really new so I am a little bit surprised at people's reaction.

"I know there is a level of conservatism to break through and for me, I feel that that's my role as an artist is to challenge convention and to make people reconsider things they feel that will challenge their own preconceived notions."

Ms Varga's work was chosen from 72 finalists and 492 entries from across Australia.

The Olive Cotton Award is a biennial award for photographic portrait, named in honour of pioneering Australian modernist photographer Olive Cotton.

Topics: arts-and-entertainment, photography, visual-art, fine-art-photography, murwillumbah-2484, tweed-heads-2485, sydney-2000, canberra-2600

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Posted July 25, 2017 14:41:02 The winner of one of Australia's premier photographic-portrait prizes - a grandmother's scrawled pen marks and saliva on a piece of film - has sparked an outcry. Some critics of the winner of the $20,000 Olive Cotton Award have accused the judge of simply wanting to create controversy.

# data[].attributes.body
Look I don’t want to add to the beat up, but jeez some ridiculous things are being said about Justine Varga’s winning photograph for the Olive Cotton Portrait prize. Now a professor of Law at the University of Sydney is saying the chemical and light produced image of Justine Varga’s grandmother’s pen marks and spittle isn’t authored by Varga but by her Grandmother.

# data[].attributes.headline
Justine Varga: Photographic Process and Portraiture

# data[].attributes.subject
Justine Varga: Photographic Process and Portraiture

# data[].attributes.body
Check out this video ...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Justine Varga: Photographic Process and Portraiture

# data[].attributes.body
Professor Weatherall also said that merely reproducing a work did not make a person its author.

You have to contribute original expression to the artistic work to be an author," she said. "That would require, in this case, in some way changing the scrawls, or how they were presented on the page, or re-colouring the entire thing, or adding an entirely different background.

# data[].attributes.headline
Justine Varga Artist Interview, Emanations: The Art of Cameraless Photography

# data[].attributes.subject
Justine Varga Artist Interview, Emanations: The Art of Cameraless Photography

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Justine Varga Artist Interview, Emanations: The Art of Cameraless Photography

# data[].attributes.headline
Justine Varga / Maternal Line September 2017

# data[].attributes.subject
Justine Varga / Maternal Line September 2017

# data[].attributes.headline
Listen to the podcast interview with Justine Varga

# data[].attributes.subject
Listen to the podcast interview with Justine Varga

# data[].attributes.body
FBi Radio, 10 September 2017 (time code 00:46:30 – 00:53:35)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Episode first aired on 10 September 2017 at 11:00 am

Justine Varga, Packer Room Prize, Frida Deguise, Post Motel

In this episode Justine Varga discusses her show at the Australian Centre for Photography. We talk about the Archibald Prize Packing Room Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales with head packer and the deciding vote Steve Peters. Comedian Frida Deguise talks about her upcoming projects. Tracks by Post Motel.

Track listing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Justine Varga, Packer Room Prize, Frida Deguise, Post Motel on Canvas: Art and Ideas 10/9/2017

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In this episode Justine Varga discusses her show at the Australian Centre for Photography. We talk about the Archibald Prize Packing Room Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales with head packer and the deciding vote Steve Peters. Comedian Fri