architecture – Page 2 – Thought Factory

architecture, camel trek, Flinders Ranges, history

history + photography

April 2, 2019

I have increasingly been turning towards the layers of history in my project orientated photography of the present. The presence of history in the present is a complex relationship, and in exploring it I have come face to face with the historical, foundational narratives in Australia.

These colonial setter narratives contribute to the creation of national myth of heroic solo-endeavour and human tragedy within a ‘harsh’, intractable and unforgiving environment in which only the bravest and boldest could survive.

For instance, the western historiography of heroic exploration in colonial Australia is generally understood within the grand narrative of struggling heroically against adversity’ in the search for more land for further settler expansion and settlement.

This is a fundamental part of colonial occupation and imperial expansion premised on the elimination of the aboriginal people and the wholesale appropriation of their land. The primary motive for elimination is access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.

architecture, landscape, Melbourne, ruins, topographics

drosscapes

October 12, 2018

Georgina Downey has usefully suggested that the collaborative project of photographing industrial Melbourne by Stuart Murdoch and myself can be usefully framed as belonging to what landscape architects, call drosscapes. We have been photographing in and around waste urbanscapes that are different from edge lands as it is a junkyard that is a by product of industrialisation and is in the process of being redeveloped.

The concept of drosscape was coined by Alan Berger (a landscape architect and associate professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design) in 2006 in his book, Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America to refer to the waste landscapes. Berger proposed classifying a differentiation between waste landscapes (places that store, manage or process urban or industrial waste), wasted landscapes (polluted or abandoned sites), and wasteful landscapes (huge extensions of developed land with virtually no use for the community).

wasteland, Nth Melbourne

The idea of drosscape applies to the industrial Melbourne site that Stuart and I have been photographing, as this wasteland is currently being redeveloped as part of the extension of the Melbourne underground. Berger says that a drosscape is:

“the creation of a new condition in which vast, wasted, or wasteful land surfaces are modeled in accordance with new programs or new sets of values that remove or replace real or perceived wasteful aspects of geographical space (i.e., redevelopment, toxic waste removal, tax revenues, etc.)”. As a verb, he sees the ‘drosscaping’ as the practice incorporating social programs and activities into the transformed waste landscape.”

He adds that one must not commit the mistake to call an abandoned train station by itself a drosscape. In this instance, a drosscape would be the integration of new horizons onto the unused site, which by itself it is only dross. Continue Reading…

architecture, landscape, Mallee, roadtrip

Returning to the silo project

August 11, 2018

The conceptually based and low key Silo project is taking me a while to refine and to realize in spite of its simplicity. It has been refined to a minimal project that consists of photographing 15 silos on the Mallee Highway from Talem Bend to Piangil using one camera (an 8×10 Cambo monorail), one lens (a Schneider-Kreuznach Symmar 300mm f/5.6), one type of film (Ilford FP4 Plus) and one tripod (a Linhof Heavy Duty).The photographs, like those of the conceptual artists in the 1960s and early 70s (e.g., Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations), will be paired with words in the form of titles and published in book form. There is nothing complicated about this kind of project.

Despite this conceptual simplicity and clarity it is taking me quite a while to realize the idea behind the project. It started in 2016 on some road trips, but, to my surprise, I have discovered that getting it up and running has proved to be difficult. I initially thought that I would photograph in colour as well as black and white but that approach ended in confusion. I then encountered various problems using the camera, the coverage limitations of the initial lens I was using (a Schneider-Kreuznach Symmar 210mm f/5.6), and difficulties developing the 8×10 sheet film without my own darkroom.

silo, Mallee Highway, Victoria

I also thought that I could work on the Silo project whilst simultaneously working on the Mallee Routes one, given that I was frequently travelling up and down the Mallee Highway to go toad from the various Mallee Routes photo camps. However, I found that though I carried the 8×10 Cambo with with me whilst on the Mallee Routes road trips, I would never get around to using it to work on the silo project. I was too caught up in the Mallee Routes project. I eventually came to realise that these were two separate projects that required quite different approaches to photography. Continue Reading…

architecture, landscape, Melbourne

walking in Sunshine, Melbourne

June 13, 2018

Prior to going on the camel trek to the northern Flinders Ranges I was in Melbourne for a photoshoot about old industrial Melbourne for an upcoming SALA exhibition at Atkins Photo Lab with Stuart Murdoch. We spent a part of Sunday afternoon walking along Kororoit Creek in Sunshine in Melbourne’s west. It was a pleasant afternoon walking for a couple of hours along the creek from Stuart’s place, even though I was suffering from a painful back that I’d damaged just prior to leaving Adelaide for Melbourne.

The creek features in Stuart’s Sunshine project–which is about place, lived experience and memory. Some of his photos made along the Kororoit Creek Trail had been included a recent exhibition he had in 2018. It was interesting walking with a fellow photographer in their own territory.

Kororoit Creek, Sunshine

Though Sunshine is generally regarded as one of the forgotten suburbs of Melbourne’s west, I find it to be a fascinating place, both photographically and sociologically. It is a low-density residential suburb that is close to Melboune’s CBD by rail; the Vietnamese migrants are rapidly changing this suburb from its old industrial and white working class base; it still has plenty of industrial sites; it is earmarked for redevelopment; and there are some well cared for public commons. It is a photographically rich suburb to walk around in. Stuart’s Sunshine project is a making sense of this place that is his home. Continue Reading…

Adelaide, architecture, critical writing

on photographic criticism in Australia

May 24, 2018

One of the more noticeable characteristics of the contemporary photographic culture in Australia is the dearth of independent critical-writing or public criticism that endeavours to convince the wider public of the worth of art photography through the process of explicating, encouraging, elevating, supporting, critiquing. There is next to nothing icy way of photo criticism in Adelaide:—the Broadsheet Journal has closed down, whilst The Adelaide Review, Artlink and Tulpa basically overlook/ignore photographic exhibitions The consequence of this lack of cultural building blocks is that art photographers working on long term projects live in a critical vacuum, despite the shift online to a networked digital world.

Many traditional photographers would not be concerned about this vacuum in photography’s critical discourse as they have no real love for art criticism, but it is a depressing situation that we find ourselves in. Criticism is a crucial part of making and enabling a photographic culture, and photography has been at the centre of critical debates and themes throughout late twentieth and 21st century art photography’s and it has had a crucial impact on contemporary art in this period.

Royal Adelaide Hospital

This lack of a critical impulse and discourse about contemporary photography is reinforced by the lack of value around the arts in mainstream media and among the public more generally. The entire journalism industry has been going through a major phase of disruption, and arts coverage has been the first to go in the mainstream media. It has been decimated over the last decade, which makes the newspapers irrelevant.

The primary reason for this is that the arts are no longer a priority for the mainstream media that is still dependent on advertising and sales revenue. The shift to digital means that the emphasis is now all about what rates online in terms of the most clicks from readers. Since the reviews of exhibitions are not being read, other than by those immediately connected to them, so the media publishers stop publishing art reviews. As his well known, the advertising model is broken and people do not want to subscribe to the mainstream media. Arts coverage in the mainstream media is directly commensurate with the advertising dollars it brings in re the page’s profitability. This means that arts coverage is in its own silo – it survives off the strength of art-related advertisers only. Continue Reading…

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