Meet Photographer Ruth Maddison

Ruth Maddison is one of Australia’s foremost photographers. For 48 years Maddison has been exploring ideas surrounding relationships, working lives, and communities through portraiture and social documentary photography. A self-taught practitioner, Maddison shot her first roll of film in 1976 and had her first solo exhibition in 1979 at the Ewing Gallery, Melbourne. Her work continues to be exhibited widely throughout Australia in solo and group exhibitions. She was the 2002 winner of the Josephine Ulrick National Photography Prize, the 2007 City of Hobart Art Prize, and a 2013 finalist in the Olive Cotton Portrait Award. Her work is represented in major public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, the Museum of Contemporary Art, National Portrait Gallery, GOMA Queensland, the National Library and the State Libraries of Victoria and New South Wales. For her most recent exhibition at South East Centre for Contemporary Art, Bega, An abundance of caution, 2024, Maddison introduced drawings and embroidered text on re-purposes doilies to her practice for the first time.

Ruth Maddison at Open House Melbourne. Photograph: Breeana Dunbar

What sparked your initial interest in photography, and how did your family's background influence your passion for capturing life stories?

I first picked up a camera in 1976 when I was 30 and untrained in any art form, actually untrained in anything at all. 

At the time I was living in a group household in north Carlton with a bunch of creatives, one of whom was Ponch Hawkes, who was already working as a photographer and still is. There was a darkroom upstairs and one day, after I shot my first roll of film using Ponch’s camera, she took me into the darkroom and showed me how to process film, make a proof sheet, and my first print. I’d found my mojo. Instantly hooked on the magical, chemical processes resulting in the appearance of an image. I immediately wanted to photograph everyone in the world and hear their story.

You describe yourself as a "quasi-sociologist and a voyeur who works with a camera." How does this perspective shape your work, particularly in social documentary photography?

I think it goes the other way around. When I look at my documentary work it seems to me I’m a quasi-sociologist, before I picked up a camera I was an introvert and shy in social situations/groups. Happy to be quiet and just watch. The camera was a way to be in any situation with purpose but stay ‘behind the camera’ if I wanted to. I use the description as a joke really.

What do you find most compelling about the everyday domestic, working family, and recreational lives you document?

I am interested in what unites us rather than what separates us. Our lives are similar and different at the same time. We are all ordinary and extraordinary. The camera – the images I make and the way I use text – allows me entrance into people’s lives for a short, intense time. It is always surprising and compelling.

How did the feminist movement in the arts during the time you started out shape your work and identity as a photographer?

I feel like I was lucky with my work when I started. The time was right in relation to documenting the everyday, the personal and the political – primarily due to the impact of the worldwide 1960s/70s wave of Feminism on women artists particularly who were bringing all aspects of daily life - domestic life, children, every day – into the art area. And the signs of our times are all worthy of artistic consideration. The personal is political was a rallying cry of the times. 

How has your work evolved to use cameraless photography techniques?

During my crossover years from darkroom to digital, from 2002 until I dismantled my darkroom in 2006, I was thinking about my early experimental days and what I would miss not being in the darkroom. I made 4 series of photograms and lumen prints. Camerless processes. Photograms in the darkroom with objects exposed on paper under the enlarger and processed as prints. Lumen prints are made laying objects on top of photographic paper outside of the darkroom and exposed to light then put through a fixer bath and washed. No camera, no enlarger, no developer.

Photograph by Ruth Maddison, a part of the QVWC Open House exhibition

What was the inspiration behind incorporating drawings and embroidered text on repurposed doilies for your recent exhibition, "An Abundance of Caution"?

In 2021, after I came home from a major solo exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, I was completely uninterested in taking photographs. I had made a list of Covid related words and expressions I kept hearing during 2020 and into 2021 – variants, surge, the jab, pivoting, covid kilos, mandatory check-in. And so on. In 2022 I started sourcing doilies from op shops. Beautiful doilies stained by unknown families, traditionally hand-made by women and eventually discarded by subsequent generations but holding their history in their stains and frayed edges and household memories.

Historically, working from home has implied ‘women’s work’ and often with derogatory undertones. But suddenly the world was working from home, and the connotations of that expression changed forever.

I had never embroidered anything, but chain stitch seemed approachable. I embroidered 62 covid-related words/expressions onto doilies collected from near and far. I have repurposed beautiful, discarded women’s work that have been part of the past but not necessarily part of official history, and overlayed them with a contemporary shared history. The embroidery series is called Working from home.

Concurrently in late 2022, I was immobilized due to an accident. It seemed possible that the life I had known could unravel. (Didn’t happen. Totally recovered.) Unable to get to my studio, I began making small doodle drawings, and soon saw a connection between the drawings and the uncontrollable, twisted and abandoned endpieces of embroidery threads which had started to appear on all the floors and other surfaces of my house. The doodles got bigger. I started adding embroidery thread and machine sewing to some of them. I also saw connections between them and the repetitive work of the embroidery on the found doilies. They became part of the same body of work. The doodled drawing series is called Unravel.

Together with other work - a small series of lumen prints, my grandmother’s crocheted lace tablecloth that came with her from Odesa and I now own, and 3 small connecting text pieces – I produced ‘An abundance of caution’, exhibited at SECCA, Bega, NSW (my local) May – July this year

What advice would you give to aspiring photographers who wish to document social issues and everyday life?

Just shoot more.

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Interview by Freya Bennett

Ruth Maddison participated in an artist talk and viewing of her photographs taken of the original Queen Victoria Hospital, as part of Open House Melbourne @ QVWC on Saturday 27 July 2024. Her exhibition will run at QVWC until mid August.