Jennie Boddington

Early life

Jennie Boddington (née Blackwood) was born in Melbourne in 1922. She married in the early 1940s, bearing a son, Tim in 1943. Beginning her career amongst Australia’s New Wave of filmmakers in Sydney, she worked as wardrobe assistant with costume designer Dahl Collings on Harry Watt's Ealing feature film The Overlanders (1946), then on eight hundred costumes for Watt's unfinished follow-up, Eureka Stockade (1948).

Training

Boddington entered the Commonwealth Film Unit in 1948 as cutting room assistant and was there for two and a half years making a lifelong friend in Joan Long (scriptwriter and film producer later known for writing Caddie (1976) and producing Puberty Blues (1981)). In 1947/8 the Commonwealth Film Unit, part of the Australian National Film Board, had moved from 66 King Street in Sydney’s CBD to 5 Condor Street in Burwood, a suburb of Sydney, into an 1879 Department of Education building, where facilities consisted of cutting rooms, a theatre, a room housing recording equipment, a camera room and office space and provided training that the private companies didn’t. Boddington trained there with important Australian and Canadian documentary filmmakers including Australian National Film Board Producer-in-Chief, Stanley Hawes, Colin Dean and Ron Maslyn Williams, and her first editing and directorial experience came in working with John Heyer on The Valley Is Ours (1948).

Zanthus Films

Divorced in 1950, she moved back to Melbourne and for six years scripted, edited and directed training films for the Victorian General Post Office film unit.

In 1956, she was employed by ABC TV, where she edited reportage of the Melbourne Olympic Games, and met, then in 1958 married, cinematographer (Newcombe) Adrian Boddington (b. Kalgoorlie, 3 June 1911) and with whom she had three more sons, James (b.1959), Alastair (b.1961) and Nicholas (b.1963).

Establishing together the Zanthus Films partnership, for which she reverted to her family name Blackwood, they operated from their home in Hawthorn, producing documentaries including the BP-commissioned Three in a Million (1959), Port of Melbourne (1961), and You Are Not Alone (1961) on the then tabu subject of breast cancer and masectomy. These titles were amongst early Australian Film Institute Award winners, as was the film Anzac (1959), scripted by Cyril Pearl, which pioneered the use of historical stills with rostrum camera effects.

Curator of photography

After Adrian Boddington’s death at 59 in 1970, Jennie Boddington retired from active film production. She then took up the post of first full-time curator of photography for the National Gallery of Victoria in 1972. She was selected from fifty-three applicants, becoming the first such curator in Australia and perhaps only the third in the world. Her selections of works for exhibition and acquisition were inclusive, not restricted only to 'art' photography, but rather emphasising its value as a medium of communication.

Boddington devoted several exhibitions to contemporary Australian photographers including the well known and the recently discovered, giving equal billing to male and female artists; among these were Micky Allan, Jon Rhodes, Carol Jerrems, Jillian Gibb, Ruth Maddison, and David Stephenson. She debuted the Geelong landscape photographer Laurie Wilson, and promoted the work of the young Bill Henson recognising his talent with his first major exhibition while he was still a student.

Important early Australian photography was given space, including that of Fred Kruger whose prints and glass plates were brought to the curator by his descendants, and also the Antarctic photographers Frank Hurley and Herbert Ponting.

Boddington's experience as a documentary film researcher and scriptwriter enabled some original insights in publications; Russell Drysdale's use of colour photography as an aide-mémoire was posited in an exhibition she curated in 1987, and in her catalogue essay, which reveals in previously unknown photographic imagery this method of working and Drysdale's expressive stylisation in interpretation of colour, subject matter and specific locations.

In her role Boddington toured Europe, London and America in 1975, meeting photographers Andre Kertesz and Bill Brandt as well as John Szarkowski, director of the Museum of Modern Art, an experience that influenced her ideas about curatorship, and leading her to decide that the acquisition of important overseas material should become a priority. To this end, South African apartheid photographer David Goldblatt and the equally controversial Czech Jan Saudek were given major exhibitions (which were amongst these photographers' first shows internationally) and their works purchased, during Boddington's tenure.

Later life

Returning to Sydney in 1994 at age 72, Boddington went on to work as a free-lance researcher, cataloguing the files and photographic archives of Australian Walkabout magazine and other collections in The Mitchell Library, and contributing to the Australian Dictionary of Biography. She died on 15 November 2015, in Melbourne.

Publications

Films (selected)