The assemblage approach to the  photographic past  does suggest metaphors  such as  mosaic, patchwork, heterogeneity, fluidity, transitory configuration. It also  implies an indefiniteness, messiness, a jumbling together. This kind of  indeterminacy is okay for reconstructing memories of the past.   The book  is  an assemblage and its status as an assemblage does not prevent it from containing assemblages within itself.

The marginalia in the title refers to  being on the margins of art photography–a place of exteriority or alterity from which one might still treat of photography. Art photography at the time was as narrowly defined in terms of being a graduate of the art school,  obtaining grants  for projects, having exhibitions and a career in the art institution.  This public sphere was a controlled space in a specific time that is in tension with what is outside this networked space. Prior to photography become an art form in the early 1970s and the emergence of art photography,  cultural cringe was prevalent with regard to Australian photography.   It was rarely, if ever, talked about as an art form. Australian photography was still in the hands of the camera clubs and magazines and influenced by those aesthetics.

Modernist photography was obsessed with issues of visuality,  creating  new vocabularies of vision, and the radical eye.”Look at how I, and the camera, see the world: that is all there is.” This  mode of artists using photography privileges the sensibility of the individual photographer or his or hers own unique vision.This  is the artist as hero who had the vision to see the form behind modernity’s  movement and change; a viewpoint that was obscured for the ordinary person by the specters and phantasmagorias of  everyday life.  The artist observer is  a ‘Seer’.

In Australia in the 70’s this tradition became associated via the art institutions in Melbourne, such as The Photographers Gallery, The Church Street Gallery  and the National Gallery of Victoria’s Department of Photography with the American  fine art tradition that placed an emphasis on  photography as a medium,  the formal and expressive qualities of the image,  and the technical excellence of their prints. The work circulated in specialist photography galleries which meant that this photographic culture was seen to become insular,  limited, a ghetto, and culturally exhausted.