Sydney and John Williams
Robert McFarlane, 2004
During the five decades in which John Williams has been photographing Sydney, he has observed a city evolving from a core of slowly dissolving monoculturalism - a town where Paddington and Balmain were once working-class suburbs and serious Celtic-faced men wore felt hats and drank beer while they contemplated the daily double,
studying their Form Guide as if it had just arrived from the oracle at Delphi.
Williams's images calibrate Sydney's journey towards becoming a maturing, turbulent, more youth-orientated, multicultural metropolis. Williams's Sydney Diary exhibition at the Museum of Sydney successfully takes the warming temperature of a ripening city from that most defining arena of any society - the street. These are gritty, wry observations of a populace at work, play and during the moments of mystery that lie somewhere in between.
There is a sense in some of Williams's subjects' faces, especially men, that they can't quite believe their luck to be living in a soporific, sensual city that asks so little of them. A sense of abandon also prevails, particularly in images Williams made during a Rocks Festival in 1973. One defining moment shows a disorientated reveller, partly
dressed in women's clothes, blithely exposing his sex, as they used to say, for Williams's Leica. Gender confusion radiates from within the man's addled stance, eccentric garb and beatific smile.
Williams records the moment with unblinking candour. John Williams's visual grammar is similar to that of Henri
Cartier-Bresson and, more locally, Roger Scott. The moment observed appears paramount to this photographer but Williams applies less of the extreme precision of composition for which both Cartier-Bresson and Scott are well known. Williams practises a simpler form of observation, more about economy than the elegant street geometry of Cartier-Bresson.
This is well expressed in his touching image of a young girl unable to stay awake at a Greek wedding in Newtown in 1971. He also shows an early fascination with ceremony in his 1964 photograph of a young girl mimicking soldiers marching through Hyde Park. This image, like the wedding picture, is an honest response to a moment of human grace. Many of the photographs in this exhibition appear in a recently published monograph of Williams's work, Line Zero (UNSW Press, 2004), available at the Museum of Sydney bookshop.
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