Eye to eye, two women share images that tell stories of strength

Haines, in turn, picks out the image Millowick took in 1977 of a young woman called Tammy holding her baby.

“There is a complete moment of genuine, honest connection that exists between Tammy and Julie, a quiet shared moment allowing each of them to see the other,” Haines says.

“Forty-four years later I want to know Tammy, to sit down and have a cup of tea with her, to listen to her dreams and hear about her life. Creating moments like this is a beautiful skill that Julie has.”

Listening to them speak, it is difficult to believe that before 2019 Millowick and Haines didn’t know each other. Separated by age and location (Haines lives in Melbourne and Millowick in regional Victoria) they never connected, despite their common passion: photographing women.

Their meeting in 2019 – orchestrated by then-director and CEO of Footscray Community Arts Centre Martin Paten – changed everything.

“He really wanted for us to meet because he thought there was a story to tell there,” Millowick recalls.

As soon as the pair met, creative sparks ignited.

“I knew there were these two very different artists of different ages, backgrounds and periods of time, and I just felt there was a story there,” Paten recalls. “I saw an opportunity to explore a new dialogue in photography.”

Fast-forward to 2021 (as Haines points out, “2020 really is a wasteland”) and the pair’s striking exhibition features women in their everyday life.

Encompassing 36 images from Millowick’s archive from 1975 to 1985 (the United Nations Decade for Women) and 14 contemporary portraits of women and two video works by Haines, Eye to Eye aims to examine 46 years of womanhood through the lens of two feminist artists.

“I had always been interested in photographing women, and in 1975 I really revved it up, so I had a lot of images that were about women in ordinary, everyday situations,” Millowick says. “When I mentioned this to Jody, she just sparked off that and here we are.”

Haines, an Indigenous contemporary photo-media artist who uses photography and film to interrogate identity, representation and the female gaze, says that as soon as she met Millowick, she wanted to find a way to meaningfully combine their observations of women through time.

“Julie has been so generous with her time, allowing me to look through her archives to find a way to connect our work together,” Haines says.

Wading through thousands of images, Haines chose 36 that she felt would work well with her own collection of images and video works.

“I was looking for the quiet moments, the images that stood out and lasted in the mind,” she says. “I had in mind what the feeling of Julie’s work was and how that would fit in with my images, what the experience of the 1975 to 85 [period] was, and how that translates 46 years later.”

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The result is a series of small, black and white photographs hung in a straight line like a film strip (an ode to Millowick’s archive of 1970s negatives), interspersed with Haine’s larger-than-life portraits of women digitally manipulated and printed on fabric hanging from the ceiling, rendered alive at the merest touch of wind.

Haines – who believes photography has too long been dominated by masculine language and the heterosexual, male gaze – printed the images on fabric to “introduce an element of the feminine into a primarily masculine medium of art”.

The exhibition reveals a certain, fundamental truth: that women lead, and have always led, complex lives outside of the male gaze.

Eye to Eye runs until March 20 at Footscray Community Arts Centre.