Woman outside the house with flowers. From the series: Dreams and illusions

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

In 1984 Margaret Dawson began staging large coloured photographs of stereotypical mid-twentieth-century Western women that looked part documentary, part snapshot — but were neither — using herself as the model. She contradicted traditional expectations of photographs as straightforward records of reality, and undermined notions that artworks have a wholly original, inbuilt quality or aura.
‘As photographer, director, actor or model within the image I have been the key figure for the manufacture for each of my artworks.’1 The word ‘manufacture’ indicates Dawson’s purposeful approach. Motivated by feminist theory, allied with a strong sense of social conscience, she questioned the expectation that women’s roles were natural and inevitable. Taking directorial control of both sides of the camera — that of the (traditionally male) artist/viewer and (traditionally female) viewed object — Dawson disrupts all assumptions.

Dawson’s appearance in Woman outside the house with flowers recalls the standard snapshot portraits seen in every family album, but signals both internal conflict and external resistance. Is she at war with herself or with the gaze of the camera? Her costume is a theatrical mash-up of masculine and feminine codes, while her pose unsettles the snapshot genre. The flounced floral skirt under the tailored male jacket is acidic green, while blowsy flowers emerge from a bushy corner. Influenced by leading American artist Cindy Sherman, whose Untitled film stills, 1977–80 (Museum of Modern Art, New York), were ‘not only photographic records of performances but, inversely, performative accounts of filmic images’,2 Dawson’s ordinary New Zealand women appear dangerous or disturbed, recalling the New Zealand gothic or film noir vein of Jane Campion. Although outside the house, the woman remains tightly confined by it and by her self-protecting arms. Flash lighting creates odd shadows which jar in the daylit scene. Are the flowers of the title more important or is the focus on the axe handle propped next to her against the wall? Its presence signals both potential threat and a further blurring of male and female roles. Dawson’s images of women communicate social unease, but elude definitive meaning. She wrote, ‘As a mistress of photography I’m up to a little subversion.’3

Janet Bayly

1 Margaret Dawson and Louise Garrett, The men from uncle: photoworks by Margaret Dawson, Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch, 1998, p. 13.

2 Amada Cruz, Elizabeth AT Smith and Amelia Jones, Cindy Sherman: Retrospective, Thames & Hudson, New York, 1997, p. 4.

3 Dawson and Garrett, The men from uncle, p. 12.