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Mirrors served both practical and conceptual roles in Jerrems’ photographs, enabling her to manipulate space and allude to ideas of fragmentation or distortion. The only colour photograph in this exhibition, Mirror with a memory: Motel room was made on the Gold Coast during the filming of Esben Storm’s film, In search of Anna. It was on this trip that they ended their relationship.
For her self-titled 1978 exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, Jerrems hung an actual mirror, framed identically, next to the print. The viewer couldn’t look at this portrait of Jerrems and Storm, reflected back through the camera, without also seeing themselves. In an artist statement for the show, betraying the raw honesty of the work, Jerrems wrote: ‘These Photographs Are Portraits, They Are Also Self Portraits and Mirrors.’
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Gift of Mrs Joy Jerrems 1981.
© The Estate of Carol Jerrems
Carol Jerrems: Portraits is a major exhibition of one of Australia’s most influential photographers. Jerrems’ intimate portraits of friends, lovers and artistic peers transcend the purely personal and have come to shape Australian visual culture.
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