Carol Jerrems

Carol Jerrems' life and work has achieved wide recognition through exhibitions and screenings of her films; the touring 1990 Australian National Gallery posthumous retrospective, Living in the 70s: Photographs by Carol Jerrems, curated by Helen Ennis and Bob Jenyns; the documentary Girl in a Mirror (2005); and the Heidi exhibition and accompanying book Up Close comparing her to autobiographical documentarians, the Americans Larry Clark and Nan Goldin, and Australian William Yang.

The actors included Kate Grenville and Esben Storm, who shared a house with Jerrems at 19 Second Avenue, Willoughby, and was shot on 16 mm film by fellow tenant, Michael Edols. The film was (posthumously) a finalist in the general section of the Greater Union Awards and shown on 13 June 1980, at the opening of the Sydney Film Festival at the State Theatre, Sydney. Critic Robert Neri wrote; "Hangin Out [sic] is well shot in black and white, about a female stripper, and composed of fast and slow, theatrical and verité-like shots."

In 1979 Jerrems began teaching at the School of Art in the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education, Hobart, but was admitted to hospital on 12 June suffering Budd–Chiari syndrome. Despite the painful condition, she worked on a photo-diary of her prolonged stay in Royal Hobart Hospital then traveled to Sydney that August to contribute to the Visual Arts Board photography assessment panel for the Australia Council with Bill Heimerman. However, on 19 November 1979 she was admitted again to hospital in Melbourne. She died 21 February 1980 at The Alfred Hospital.

In Sydney, Jerrems exhibited solo and conducted workshops at the ACP. She later showed at Hogarth Galleries, then with Christine Godden, Christine Cornish and Jenny Aitken in Four Australian Women, at the Photographers' Gallery in South Yarra, Melbourne (18 May–11 June 1978), and with Roderick McNicol at Pentax Brummels Gallery of Photography (3 August–3 September 1978). Another solo exhibition at the ACP followed in November that included photographs from her series Thirty—eight Buick (1976) and Sharpies (1976). Meanwhile, Jerrems completed her film Hanging About (1978), about rape:

She used available light, without flash; responding in 1978 to Philip Quirk's unpublished interview question for Rolling Stone, "If you could be in any one situation anywhere, at any time with anyone and any camera, what would it be?" Jerrems answered "With people or one person, natural light, morning or late afternoon, and a 35mm SLR."

In 1975, Jerrems moved to Sydney to live with her boyfriend, filmmaker Esben Storm. She taught at Hornsby and Meadowbank Technical Colleges.

These successes brought her, in 1974, an exhibition of her 1968 College assignment The Alphabet Folio at the National Gallery of Victoria, and inclusion in a survey of contemporary Australian photography published by the newly formed Australian Centre for Photography (ACP), Sydney. She published A Book About Australian Women prompted by the upcoming International Women's Year (IWY) of 1975, also exhibiting 32 works-in-progress from this series at Brummels (1974).

When, in 1973, Jerrems started teaching at Heidelberg Technical School, she befriended its disadvantaged students who lived in the 1956 Olympic Village housing commission flats, some of whom were members of sharpie gangs. She photographed and filmed them in nearby Banyule Reserve at Viewbank on the Yarra River. Series of these images were published in the Melbourne University quarterly Circus amongst the increasing number of commissions and publications she secured through her widening networks in cinema, theatre, music and women's liberationist and aboriginal communities.

She remained close to Paul Cox, appearing in his The Journey (1972), and to fellow Prahran College ex-students lan Macrae and Robert Ashton, with whom she shared 11 Mozart Street, St. Kilda. She appears in Ian Macrae's experimental stop-frame short Fly Wrinklys Fly which he made for Channel 9.

Jerrems also made a friend of 62-year-old Henry Talbot (who was then exchanging an illustrious career in fashion photography for teaching), posed for him. They formed a collaboration so successful that when Australia's first stand-alone photography gallery Brummels was opened by Rennie Ellis and Robert Ashton above a cafe at 95 Toorak Road, South Yarra, the inaugural exhibition was Two Views of Erotica: Henry Talbot/Carol Jerrems (14 December 1972 – 21 January 1973). Talbot invited her to teach photography with him at the Preston Institute and in 1975 she also began teaching photography, filmmaking and yoga at Coburg Technical School, Melbourne.

In 1971, National Gallery of Victoria curator Jennie Boddington (from 1972 director of the first Department of Photography in any Australian public gallery) acquired Jerrems' work for the collection.

Known for documenting the revolutionary spirit of sub-cultures including that of indigenous Australians, disaffected youth, and the emergent feminist movement of Melbourne in the 1970s, her work has been compared to that of internationally known Americans Larry Clark–of a slightly older generation–and Nan Goldin, as well as fellow Australian William Yang.

Carol Jerrems (14 March 1949 – 21 February 1980) was an Australian photographer/filmmaker whose work emerged just as her medium was beginning to regain the acceptance as an art form that it had in the Pictorial era, and in which she newly synthesizes complicity performed, documentary and autobiographical image-making of the human subject, as exemplified in her Vale Street.

Jerrems was born on 14 March 1949 at Ivanhoe, Melbourne the third child of Victorian-born parents Eric Alfred Jerrems (1917–1970), an accountant with Edward Trenchard and Co., Stock and Station Agents in Collins Street, Melbourne, and Joyce Mary (a.k.a. Joy) née Jacobs, (1922–1993), commercial seamstress and hobby watercolorist. Jerrems attended (1955–60) Ivanhoe Primary School and Heidelberg High School (1961–66) and went on to complete a Diploma of Art and Design, majoring in Photography (1967–70), in the newly established photography course at Prahran Technical School, where she was taught by cinematographer Paul Cox and acted in his film Skin Deep. During her studies she was awarded the Walter Lindrum Scholarship, the Institute of Australian Photographers Award, and First Prize in the Kodak Students Photographic Competition.