Rod McNICOL: Juliet 1978

Rod McNicol (1946–2025)

Rod McNicol studied photography at Prahran College in 1974, where he was part of a now-highly significant generation of young photographers who were taught by Athol Shmith, Paul Cox and John Cato. He was actively involved in the photography scene that emerged in Melbourne at this time, and established the Photographers Gallery in South Yarra with John Williams and Ingeborg Tyssen.

McNicol’s photographic practice concentrated on portraiture. His approach to the genre was structured and consistent, with his subjects almost always photographed staring back at the camera against neutral backgrounds. McNicol asked his subjects to pause and stare into the camera, with the intention of capturing portraits that function as witnesses to the inescapable passing of time. In the last few years, as his eyesight deteriorated, Rod McNicol turned to still life photography. These quiet compositions of flowers became meditations on transience.

 

Juliet

This is a print of Juliet from 1978, and this work is also held within MAPh collection. The print is signed and dated by the artist. 

McNicol’s series of portraits Permanent mirrors grew out of his interest in nineteenth-century photographic portraiture, whereby the slow exposure times necessitated what he calls a ‘gauche, self-conscious, fatalist stare’. For McNicol, these portraits carried the ‘spectre of mortality itself’. The environmental portraits that make up his Permanent mirrors series embody many of the formal attributes of nineteenth-century portraiture that appealed to him, insofar as the sitters are seated in highly static poses, staring directly and blankly at the camera. Soon after, McNicol introduced a range of highly significant formal changes to his portraits, whereby sitters were photographed on a kitchen chair against a plain, neutral background in the artist’s Fitzroy studio. Throughout McNicol's practice he continued to photograph people from his neighbourhood in this way. https://maph.org.au/artworks/386/

This photograph depicts Juliet Bacskai, Rod McNicol’s first wife, and is among his earliest explorations of portraiture. As one of his earliest subjects, Juliet occupies a significant place within McNicol’s photographic language.

Juliet was a key figure in the Prahran College photography milieu of the 1970s, appearing in films by Paul Cox and in photographs by Carol Jerrems. Her image circulates across these practices.