Tracey Moffatt

The entire series 'Something More' is included in the collections of Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney. They present the series as follows:
"The nine images in Something More tell an ambiguous tale of a young woman’s longing for ‘something more’, a quest which brings dashed hopes and the loss of innocence. With its staged theatricality and storyboard framing, the series has been described by critic Ingrid Perez as ‘a collection of scenes from a film that was never made’. While the film may never have been made, we recognise its components from a shared cultural memory of B-grade cinema and pulp fiction, from which Moffatt has drawn this melodrama. The ‘scenes’ can be displayed in any order – in pairs, rows or as a grid – and so their storyline is not fixed, although we piece together the arc from naïve country girl to fallen woman abandoned on the roadside in whatever arrangement they take. Moffatt capitalises on the cinematic device of montage, mixing together continuous narrative, flashbacks, cutaways, close-ups and memory or dream sequences, to structure the series, and relies on our knowledge of these devices to make sense and meaning out of the assemblage.

Something More was made while Moffatt was artist-in-residence at Albury Regional Art Centre in May 1989, and was produced in conjunction with staff and students of the photography department at the Centre for Visual Arts Murray Campus of Charles Sturt University, the artists of the Link Access studio and the general community of Albury Wodonga. Moffatt ‘stars’ as the beautiful ingénue in the cheongsam, and conjures the stifling atmosphere of small-town life in the cane fields of her native Queensland through vividly painted sets. The pantomime feeling of the series is amplified by the stereotypical characters of the trashy blonde and the Chinese boy-next-door who feature alongside her, and the lush colour saturation of the Cibachrome images. Something More is the first of Moffatt’s photographic series which demonstrates all of the elements that have made her work so acclaimed: its theatrical staginess, its references to film, art and photographic history and issues of race and gender.'