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Traumatic history

January 25, 2016

This picture made in the Namadgi National Park is from the dark landscapes projected it is of a traumatic event–the Canberra bush fire. It is also a place of collective memory of the Canberra bushfire of 2003, which was the first confirmed case of a fire tornado in Australia, in which 4 people died, 490 were injured, over 500 homes destroyed, and 164,000 hectares burnt. That burnt area was close to 70% of the Territories total area.

burnt tree, Namadgi National Park

It is a site of traumatic history, and it is a photograph made of a place at which the bushfire event occurred over a decade before. As a photographer I came late to the scene and what is photographed is the remaining traces of the bush fire in the landscape. It is a photograph that was taken in a return to a location or site in the Namadgi National Park after the bush fire has happened, and it is made in response to the traces of this event in the landscape. Continue Reading…

colour, landscape, nature

beyond the pastoral mode

January 20, 2016

With the opening of the Fleurieuscapes exhibition at Magpie Springs done and dusted I have had bit of time to set up the various project galleries on the website properly. They now need to have more images added to the projects and I have started working on the Adelaide galleries, which are here, here and here.

I have also had time to begin to think about the Fleurieuscapes project and how I have been approach the work to date and where it needs to go. I have avoided the pastoral and the picturesque modes of the nineteenth century by concentrating on the formal aspects of the landscape. It is difficult to avoid the reduction of the landscape to a stereotype of bright sunshine and scattered gum trees in the high summer.

grass tree + pink gum

Admittedly, bright sunshine and scattered gum trees does break with the English pastoral of the Heidelberg School –the homestead paddocks with milking cows casting long shadows in early morning or twilight, as they grazed in cool temperate pasture of the Heidelberg School. The land had been successfully tamed by the settlers, and at Federation, they were celebrating their British moorings and their Anglo-Saxon heritage.

The picturesque mode relishes light and shadow, texture of grass, antiquated fences, dappled shaded cows. The picturesque was a European (English) aesthetic and Australian art was non-European and ‘unpicturesque’. This European landscape art is predicated on a widespread desire for disinterested enjoyment that precludes the direct lived engagement premised on an understanding of the actual ecology of places. It is predicted on an ‘outsider’s perspective’, rather than the experience of someone who lives in that particular place.

colour, Melbourne, urban

flying into Melbourne

December 27, 2015

This picture of Melbourne from a Qantas plane was made whilst we were returning to Australia from our brief trip to Wellington and the Tongariro National Park in New Zealand. It was early morning when we flew in. We only made our connecting flight to Adelaide with minutes to spare.

Melbourne, Victoria

It was only a couple of years ago that I used to do these kind of diary snaps with a 35m film Leica (M series). I admired the Leica ethos –that reality should be fixed on film with lenses that faithfully capture what is in front of the camera. The final print is the work of the photographer, and if the result was not as hoped for, then the photographer takes the blame, not the camera.

However, for 35mm photography I’ve made the switch to digital photography. These days I use a Sony digital camera (an old NEX-7) with Leica M lenses. The reason for the switch is that digital imagery delivers superior results when used handheld in most practical situations. The transition from film to digital technology is still a transit stage probably to digital imagery on and off the internet.

The drive of the photographic industry to produce successor models for every camera (including smart phones) with ever-shorter product cycles, there is an eager acceptance of consumers/photographers to upgrade to the newest model, and the photographer is becoming more and more of a computer technician. The search is for the perfect camera, and often it is the technology (cameras are effectively computer devices for image capture) that drives the photography. Newer models supposedly means better model. However, you cannot tell from the pictures that the newest digital camera is the best ever, since the pictures are more or less indistinguishable from those from the previous model. Continue Reading…

coastal, colour, digital, people

Summer is here

December 20, 2015

Summer is here in south-eastern Australia.

The temperatures in Adelaide have been in the high 30s and low 40s during December, the fire season is here and the firefighters battle the increasingly frequent bushfires. People are arriving on the southern coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula for their Xmas break, the holiday houses are being occupied, the boaties and their expensive boats are lining up on the Encounter Bay boat ramp to go tuna fishing, the days are long with daylight saving, and the beach is the place to go.

Petrel Cove, Victor Harbor

The light is harsh during the summer days, so photography is only possible very early in the morning or very late in the afternoon.

It is now difficult to photograph people on a beach in Australia due to the increasing hostility to “street photography” and parent’s fear about paedophiles stalking their children with cameras. This is a pity because the beach has traditionally been a public space of recreation and leisure that epitomises the personal liberties of Australia’s democratic society. The assumption that the beach is there for everyone to use was contested in the 2005 Cronulla race riots in Sydney Continue Reading…

architecture, colour, digital, urban, Wellington

art photography in Wellington

December 7, 2015

My last two visits to Wellington ( New Zealand) have enabled me to see that art photography in Wellington looks to be centred around the PhotoSpace gallery that is run by James Gilberd. The gallery opened in 1992 and it is the longest running photographic gallery in New Zealand. It remains the only gallery in the Wellington region dedicated to exhibiting contemporary New Zealand and international photography. It values a high level of craft and has a stable of established, regular exhibitors.

Unfortunately, 147 Cuba Street was closed, when I visited it. Though there are no state funded photography galleries in New Zealand, the City Gallery Wellington, regularly exhibits photography. The nearest photographic gallery to PhotoSpace is the McNamara Gallery in Whanganui. The current exhibition is contemporary ambrotypes and daguerreotypes by Joyce Campbell, and the gallery has good links to contemporary New Zealand photographers and publications.

This gallery has done far more foregrounding New Zealand photography over the past decade than the largely conservative Auckland Art Gallery and Christchurch Art Gallery, which have acted to marginalise photographers vis-a -is the public gallery system. They do so with exhibition programmes that function as if New Zealand photography wasn’t happening, or if they acknowledged photography’s existence, they were noted for their absence over the past couple of decades in dealing with the medium of photography critically.

Coop Bank, Wellington

The established Wellington-based photographers include Mary McPherson, Andrew Ross, Peter Black and Julian Ward. I knew the photographic work of Lester Blair from his Flickr days and came across the photos of Gabrielle Mckone recently whilst photographing in Wellington. I know next to nothing about the critical writing on New Zealand art and photography. I’ve only just discovered that Geoffrey Batchen is currently teaching at Victoria University. That is the extent of my surface knowledge of Wellington art photography.

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