Girl in a Mirror: A Portrait of Carol Jerrems

Clip 2: ‘Brussels sprouts’

Taken from the documentary Girl in a Mirror: A Portrait of Carol Jerrems (2005)

Original title classification not known – this clip chosen to be PG

This clip contains medium level implied violence.

Curator’s clip description

Still photographer Carol Jerrems made a short film in 1975 featuring 15-year-old schoolboys from Heidelberg Tech. Most of them had been expelled and, in Carol’s words, preferred ‘bashing, beer, sheilas, gang bangs, gang fights, billiards, stealing and hanging about’.

Curator’s notes

Rushes footage from a never completed film, Schools Out, is shown with commentary from the boys in 2005. They discuss having jumpers and shoes made for their gang. One of the boys also reveals why he was away from home on weekends – his father would be drunk and argumentative.

Damien Parer, curator

Teachers’ notes

provided by The Le@rning Federation

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This black-and-white clip shows footage of a skinhead or sharpie gang, shot by photographer Carol Jerrems in 1975. A voice-over narration from Jerrems’s journal has been added in which she reflects on the sharpie subculture and her interaction with it. Mark Lean and Jon Bourke, two of the teenage boys featured in Jerrems’s footage, who are now adults, are heard speaking about this period. Footage shows the boys swimming, hanging around wearing signature skin-head clothing and breaking things. The clip ends with two photographs of kung-fu fighting.

Educational value points

Photographer Carol Jerrems (1949–80) was influenced by the photo-documentary tradition, which uses photography to chronicle everyday life and highlight issues of social justice. Jerrems’s black-and-white photographs focus on the urban counter-cultures that emerged in the 1970s, including youth gangs, as well as on marginalised groups including women and Indigenous people. However, unlike photo-documentary practitioners, she increasingly involved her subjects in the construction of her portraits. Her work was widely exhibited in the 1970s.

Jerrems made Hanging About (c1978), which explored the impact of rape on a woman, and an unfinished film called School’s Out (1975), footage of which is featured in this clip. While Jerrems saw herself as ‘an artist whose tool of expression is the camera’ (www.adb.online.anu.edu.au), she believed that art should comment on social issues. To this end she turned her camera on marginalised groups, both to make mainstream audiences aware of these groups and to document social diversity.

In Girl in a Mirror, filmmaker Kathy Drayton creates a complex portrait of Jerrems by assembling examples of her work, including her photography and film footage, as well as extracts from her journal, which are either read by actor Justine Clarke or appear as written words on the screen. The decision to use Jerrems’s own words as the voice-over narration gives the photographer a living presence in the text and imbues her story with intimacy and immediacy.

By combining footage from an unfinished project called School’s Out and Jerrems’s account of this undertaking with the adult recollections of two of the sharpies featured in this original footage, this clip raises the very questions about representation that concerned Jerrems. The two men remember themselves as being less menacing than Jerrems believed, suggesting that she may have wanted her film to shock or at least challenge a mainstream audience, or alternatively demonstrating how adults filter their childhood memories.

Jerrems often went to great lengths to take a photograph or capture images on film and even became immersed in the lives of her subjects. This approach sometimes came at a personal cost, as she recorded in her diary when describing her encounters with the skinheads. However, it reflected a desire that her work be ‘natural and real’, and also produced ‘a level of intimacy … that comes from a relaxed and knowing dynamic between the photographer and her models’ (www.ngv.vic.gov.au).

Skinheads or sharpies were a small but visible part of the youth and urban counter-culture in the 1970s and were mainly white, working-class adolescent males who adopted a code of dress such as that seen in this clip and followed bands such as AC/DC, Lobby Loyde and the Coloured Balls, Buster Brown, Skyhooks and Hush. Gang names denoted the suburb that the gang’s members came from, for example the ‘Blackburn South Sharps’.

The references to gang rape in this clip suggest that sexual violence against women may have been an accepted part of sharpie culture, and that participation in a gang rape may have been regarded as a form of initiation.

As with the still photographs that appear in this clip, Jerrems often used mirrors to insert herself in her photographs as either a direct or indirect presence. In doing so she acknowledged her role in constructing the image. Elsewhere the film quotes Jerrems’s observation that ‘Any portrait is a combination of something of the subject’s personality and something of the photographer’s. The moment preserved is an exchange’. This method departed from the more dispassionate photo-documentary tradition.

Skinheads or sharpies had a particular dress code that included tight, knitted cardigans, bought from one or two preferred men’s outfitters, chisel-toed leather boots, and tight jeans or pinstripe trousers. The hairstyle often consisted of closely cropped hair, sometimes left longer at the neck.