Girl In A Mirror

Synopsis: Australian photographer Carol Jerrems came to prominence in the 1970s, her photo Vale St becoming one of the iconic images of the times. She died in 1980 at the age of 31 leaving a body of work that documented that turbulent decade.

A headstrong and free-spirited young woman, Carol Jerrems typified 1970s counter-cultural Australia. That she was a talented photographer who took the world around her as her subject matter is fortunate for, beyond being a recollection of her as a person by friends and lovers and an overview of her work as an artist, Kathy Drayton's documentary is a fascinating look back to the Flower Power decade Downunder.

Whilst those interested in photography will find much to ponder on in Jerrems' approach to portraiture, part candid reportage, part construction and always with a highly-self-reflexive component (she made much use of mirrors to either photograph herself as direct subject or indirect presence, hence the title of this film), probably the primary general interest in this documentary is in the window it provides onto the 1970s. A one-time student of Paul Cox and long-time lover of Ebsen Storm she was in the thick of Melbourne's Carlton-based bohemia and later its Sydney equivalent and Drayton has selected from her work a representative sample of photographs, all beautifully reproduced, that capture the spirit of the times and its lifestyles and mores.

Jerrems' life was cut short by a polycythemia, a rare blood-related cancer, but Drayton once again tellingly uses the photographic record her subject kept of her own deteriorating physical condition combined with copies of her letters, darkroom notes, and journal writings to suggest the person and potential lost. Given her passion for photographic story-telling and the circles in which she moved it is undoubtedly the case that had she lived Jerrems would have turned to feature film directing (she did at one stage apply for funding for a docu-drama).

A good deal of attention is given to Jerrems' attraction, not a little of it with a fatal quality, to the wild side of life, in particular the skinheads who provided the setting for the Vale St photo. A part of her life which spoke to her inner needs and about which her friends and associates knew little, it also provided the raw material for her apparently autobiographical short film, Hanging About, which dealt with the effects of a rape on a young woman.

An experienced editor, Drayton, who also wrote this, her first documentary, has constructed a telling portrait of a woman and artist for whom she clearly has a deep appreciation and the outcome, well-supported by original music by Greg J. Walker of Machine Translations, over and above the purely biographical and artistic aspects, is recommended to anyone who has an interest in our modern social and cultural history

 

 

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