Bottom Shelf: Black, White + Colour by Tim Dobbyn
Tim Dobbyn’s biography of Mervyn Bishop is a fleeting overview of a life that looms large in the history of Australian Photography.
Much in the way there is no truly impartial writer, there is no perfect biography. Black, White and Colour is no exception. A biography of Mervyn Bishop, hailed as Australia’s first Indigenous professional photographer, I found this to read like a story half finished – too short, dancing over the stickier parts of Bishop’s personal life and relationships, not allowing facts and realities to breathe. It’s an issue that rises again and again with biographies written while the subject is still living, and when they have a heavy hand in the shaping of the narrative.
Though I did find comfort in Bishop’s biography, it read strangely to me, with parts that read more like autobiography - factual, but not necessarily with an air of true honesty.
The truth of a life and career that has had such immense impact, historic in its firsts, is not one that of a path trod true. He stumbled, ambled, doubled back, emerging in kinship with every artist and photographer now lost without the newspaper and corporate jobs of old, left to hack out their own niche as Bishop did with none of the support or prospect of social media virality.
I did have a few questions that I really wanted to explore with others in relation to the book:
Are all photographers artists?
What was your reaction to Bishop’s “playing it down the middle” line when asked about Indigenous activism he has borne witness to throughout his lifetime?
More broadly, what is your opinion on biographies, especially those of artists? What do good ones do well?
I found that most of what I was truly interested in – Bishop’s Is There an Aboriginal Photography? and the AGNSW panel he took part in, Half Lights, were just footnotes in the book, and do not exist online. More than anything, reading this, with the knowledge that I was reading it for Bottom Shelf, made me realize that perhaps biographies as a whole are not for me, or at least not what I want to be reading to analyze in this way.