John Frank Williams (18 December 1933–30 July 2016) was an Australian photographer, academic, art critic and historian who served as the first head of photography at Sydney College of the Arts. His photographic work documenting Sydney's urban landscape in the 1960s was characterised by what he described as "rough, hard and grainy" imagery. Beyond his photographic career, Williams authored six books focused on World War I and Australian cultural history, including his notable 1995 work Quarantined Culture.
Early life and education John Williams was born in 1933 in Sydney, Australia. He was the son of Anne (Anita) Williams (née McDonnell), an accomplished violinist who abandoned her musical career upon marriage to his father, Francis Edward Williams,England & Wales, FreeBMD Birth Index, 1837-1915 a World War I veteran who had emigrated from Liverpool, England in 1925, and who had 3 children from his earlier marriage to Jane Grace Purvis (1892–1975).The National Archives; Kew, London, England; 1939 Register; Reference: RG 101/4356IEngland & Wales, Birth Index: 1916-2005, General Register Office; United Kingdom; Reference: Volume 8b, Page 485England & Wales, Birth Index: 1916-2005. General Register Office; United Kingdom; Reference: Volume 8b, Page 1128
Williams grew up in the Sydney suburb of Maroubra and completed his secondary education at Sydney Technical High School, matriculating in 1950. Following graduation, he pursued studies in mechanical engineering at Sydney Technical College and worked as a draughtsman—a practical career path typical for post-war suburban youth for whom university education was unaffordable.
Williams placed importance less on his technical training than on his interests and independent study of social historians, particularly Barbara Tuchman, Eric Hobsbawn and A.J.P.Taylor, German language, and politics. His involvement with Labor Party suburban branches introduced him to intellectuals like Guido Baracchi, with whom he engaged in discussions about European history and politics that expanded his worldview beyond the conservative confines of Australia during the Menzies era.
Photographic career Williams began his photography as a self-taught amateur in 1958 when his wife Rosemary Simpson gave him a camera and darkroom equipment, and a catalogue of The Family of Man, Edward Steichen's influential Museum of Modern Art exhibition that toured Australia in 1959, and in which only two Australian photographers, David Moore and Laurence Le Guay, were included. This exhibition, with its documentary approach presenting a benign vision of universal humanity, had a profound impact on Williams, as it did for a generation of young Australian photographers during the Cold War era.
By the mid-1960s, Williams had developed his skills through camera clubs and emerged as an accomplished street photographer. Unlike Henri Cartier-Bresson who favoured the 35mm Leica, Williams worked with a square format twin lens Rolleicord, in this period to capture the essence of Sydney's urban environment and beach culture, cropping the results to a rectangular format, though later he was to realise the value of reprinting these images full-frame.
Europe In 1965, Williams embarked on an overland journey to London with his first wife, Rosemary Simpson. London served as a base for extensive European travel over the next five years. His photographic practice during this period involved days spent capturing images, followed by evenings at camping grounds reading about the history of the places he had visited.
Return to Australia When Williams reluctantly returned to Australia in 1969, both he and the country had undergone significant changes. His photographs from this period documented both the transformations in Australian society and what remained unchanged. This coincided with a period when film, theatre, and visual arts were becoming established as legitimate professional pursuits for Australians, with new educational institutions being formed to support these fields.Deborah Ely (1999) The Australian centre for photography, History of Photography, 23:2, 118-122, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.1999.10443810
Within five years of his return, photography had experienced a boom in Australia, with Williams well positioned for this development. He contributed to the field by reviewing for photography magazines and newspapers while also teaching photography through Workers' Educational Association (WEA) courses. In Melbourne, in 1973, Williams, with Paul Cox, Ingeborg Tyssen, and Rod McNicolMcNicol gives the year of establishment as 1975 in foundedAnne Latrielle 'Pictorial gallery open today,' in The Age, Wed, 5 March 1975, Page 18 The Photographers' Gallery and Workshop at 344 Punt Road, South YarraPaul Taylor and Sebastian Costanzo, 'A Melbourne Gallery Guide,' The Age, Friday 7 August 1981, p.45 in the 1888 two-storey 'Sharp's Buildings' terrace, rented since 1965 as a photographer's studio and accommodation by Paul Cox, who from 1969–1980 taught cinematography at Prahran College.
It was the second gallery devoted to photography to be established in the city after Rennie Ellis' and Robert Ashton's Brummels Gallery (running 1972–1980) less than a kilometre away, and before Joyce Evans' Church Street Photography Centre in neighbouring Richmond (1976).
Williams traveled again on a 1974 $A1,200 Australia Council grant for a study tour to Europe and USA.
Ennis notes that Williams was one who aimed 'to simply record the things which interest me' and "went so far as to relate his printing style in 1974 to what he perceived as the Australian experience," and quotes his statement:My prints are rough, hard and grainy which is just what Sydney is like. The light is fierce, the summers hot and humid, the bush inhuman and the population complacently cruel enough to accept two decades of flabby self-congratulatory ignorance, cushioned and smothered by the soft folds of the Menzies arse. Innovations In 1977 Williams moved from 'human interest' photography of the 1960s with a series of stark, fill-flash street photographs, shot from the hip in a semi-random manner, which emphasise the disorientation and alienation of urban thoroughfares. The work was shown in a survey, A Decade of Australian Photography 1972-1982 : Philip Morris Arts Grant at the National Gallery of Australia in 1983.
A new series that Williams commenced in 1979, the Living Room Portraits, are 360º 'joiner' panoramas that survey an entire room, with one frame occupied by the human subject. His 1981 show of these at the Australian Centre for Photography was reviewed by Max Dupain: The apparent objects of the exercise, the people, are swallowed up in the engulfing domestic paraphernalia. The part is certainly not greater than the whole, and the character of the people is only partially discernible from their own images as they confront the camera full on. You have to sift through their possessions to understand their makeup. It is personality by proxy.
Arthur McIntyre in Art and Australia of 1982 remarked that Williams' "multiple image 'panoramas' of people in domestic environments were dazzling achievements that satisfied visually and cerebrally."
Williams and his partner Tyssen were granted residencies in Paris at the Cité Internationale des Arts in the late 1980s and again on two occasions in the 1990s. After he had toured European theatres of the First World War, in a 1984 group exhibition Williams superimposed images of Australian soldiers over maps of the battle sites to emphasise individual experience within sweeping historical events. Critic Hinderaker observed that "the portraits, like the maps, are curiously mute and schematic, fragments of the mysteries of fate in unknown landscapes." This material formed part of Williams MVA competed in 1985 at the Sydney College of the Arts where he was head of Department.
McDonald, noting humanism and humour in Williams' 1989 AGNSW retrospective marking the end of his teaching career, wrote that he was: ...no respecter of photographic conventions. He began as a documentary photographer but has since expanded the parameters of his work to take in sequential photographs, formal portraits, street snapshots using elements of chance and montages blending historical and new images. He has been a consistent innovator, but his experiments have been tightly structured around themes like: time in photography, urban alienation, social hierarchies and rituals, the workings of history and memory in the construction of identity.
Critic and commentator 1971–1988 Williams contributed regular reviews of photography for The Australian 1973–1977, and occasional reviews of books on photography and photographers for publications including The Age. He edited and contributed to Camera Graphics magazine from 1971 to 1974 and Photography News between 1972 and 1974.
In the journal Art and Australia of Winter 1976, Williams offers a critical survey of the development of Australian photography between 1920 and 1960, into which he himself had entered, via his analysis of Max Dupain and David Moore distinction within an otherwise derivative and uninspired national photographic culture, shaped predominantly by commercial practices and camera club pictorialism that emulated English models, but disengaged from Australian social realities. Williams situates this domestic stagnation against the backdrop of an international "Golden Age" of photography—of Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and Henri Cartier-Bresson—during which the medium underwent significant redefinition while Australian photography remained largely under the control of affluent amateurs, commercial studios, and newspaper photographers' sanitised and optimistic imagery. He notes that the Australian public’s "'incomprehension" of Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition further illustrates this cultural detachment. As global photography evolved in response to the complexities of modern life, particularly through the work of Robert Frank and the emergence of television, Moore’s practice similarly advanced, demonstrating a heightened sensitivity to environment and subject. Academic career 1976–1989 In 1976, Williams was appointed as the foundation head of photography and film at the newly established Sydney College of the Arts in Sydney. This position formalised his role as an influential figure in Australian photography education, cemented by his vigorous promotion of this branch of applied pedagogy in the press, defending it from detractors with support from his own research and data. Graduates from the courses included Judith Ahern, Jack Redgate, Debra Phillips, Ken Heyes and Anne Zahalka.