SOMETHING MORE NO. 3, 1989
TRACEY MOFFATT
cibachrome print
98.5 x 128.0 cm
signed, dated and numbered verso: T. MOFFATT ‘89 14/30
LA Galerie Lothar Albrecht, Frankfurt, Germany
Private collection, Melbourne
Tracey Moffatt, City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand, 23 February – 26 May 2002 (another example)
Newton, G. and Moffatt, T., Tracey Moffatt. Fever Pitch, Piper Press, Sydney, 1995 (another complete set from the edition illustrated in colour, pp. 39–57)
Riemschneider, B. and Grosenick, U. (eds), Art at the Turn of the Millennium, Taschen, Cologne,1999, p. 348 (illus., another example)
Savage, P. and Strongman, L. (eds), Tracey Moffatt, City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand, 2002, pp. 11, 19, 26 (illus., another example)
The following extract is from Butler, R., and Thomas, M., 'Tracey Moffatt's Beauty', in Savage, P. and Strongman, L. (eds), Tracey Moffatt, City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand, 2002, p. 39
It was the photoseries Something More (1989), along with the short film Night Cries, made the same year, that first brought Tracey Moffatt to critical attention. To summarise a plot that remains almost defiantly elliptical, it is the story of a young woman, of indeterminate racial origins, who dreams of escaping her humdrum existence in outback Australia and getting away to the city. We encounter her in the first image gazing off into the distance, while another woman (her half sister? Her father's mistress?) looks on indifferently, her own chances of finding 'something more' long since gone.
Later [in Something More No. 3] an Asian boy (a boyfriend? an admirer?) begs her to stay, but after holding up the dress she will wear she packs up and leaves. Before she can reach her destination, however, she is caught up in a bizarre sexual encounter with a highway policewoman or biker. In the last image of the series, she lies slumped in the middle of the road, her beloved dress hitched up around her waist. She is still some three hundred miles short of Brisbane.