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landscape

contemporary art,, landscape, trees

Ian Lobb + contemporary landscape photography

January 28, 2024

Ian Lobb’s black and white landscapes in his Black Range (State Park, Victoria) series opens up the possibility for a contemporary landscape photography in Australia in the early 21st century after the demise of modernism and the decay of postmodernism. Lobb worked on the Black Range series throughout the 1986-1996 market bubble decade. These intimate photographs of the Victorian bush within the image economy of a globalized world were interpreted by Helen Ennis, the then Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Art, as metaphors for psychological and spiritual states. The aesthetic background of the styles, mediums and concerns in Australia in this period is succinctly outlined by Terry Smith in this interview.

My contrasting interpretation of Lobb’s smallscale and localized Black Range landscape series is that it is part of the displacement of the modernist emphasis on photography being part of the grand narrative of the avant-garde breaking new ground in terms of art historical style. It also part of the displacement of the critical postmodernist emphasis on pastiche, parody, appropriation and a free floating simulacral world of signs disconnected from real physical objects. Several diverse strands of contemporary art emerged in the clearing opened up this displacement, and the smallscale and localized artmaking exemplified by Lobb’s modest Black Range photos, was identified by Terry Smith in his What is Contemporary Art? as one of the 3 main currents of contemporary art in the early decades of the 21st century.

My interpretation holds that the significance of Lobb’s contemporary Black Range landscapes is that this series highlights place (topos); place in the sense of Lobb being in a local place that he understood and knew very well from his frequent visits. Place is that within which we are at homeor within which we dwell, and to dwell is to be located in a harmonious relationship with one’s surrounding environment. Lobb’s intimate landscapes shows both that he was at home in the Black Range bushland and that his photography was a form of placemaking. They open up a pathway for others to begin to walk along.

In contrast to many of Melbourne’s art photographers, who relate to Ian Lobb as the master fine printer with his worthy emphasis on the beautifully crafted print, I connected to his smallscale and modest landscape photos of the local Black bush. My interpretation of this body of work as opening up a pathway for a contemporary landscape photography is that it suggests that such a photography is of the present, but one that newly mobilizes the past tradition of landscape photography. A photography that is of the present but is not out of date, doesn’t have a backward looking orientation, nor is it nostalgic.

Lobb’s Black Range series gave me the confidence to go beyond my tentative landscape photos of the local Waitpinga bush on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia by continuing to walk along his pathway and continue with my initial photographs through becoming attached to this place by being at home in the bush. I came to understand that the history of both the Black Range and the Waitpinga bush as a place or topos meant that they are both bounded and open, both singular and plural. I realized that the question of place they raise is also a question of time or history, which can be understood as a history of these specific places coming into being and undergoing change.

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landscape, nature

The pastoral tradition: a critique

September 24, 2022

I have been thinking about the relationship between climate change and a post-colonial photography of late. I have been asking myself how can still photography address climate change, given the convincing account by climate science with respect to the Anthropocene and the climate heating caused by the use of fossil fuels. If photography is to be relevant to the present, then what could an eco-orientated photography say? What kind of story could it visually narrate? I started a Tumblr blog to begin to explore this, but I have struggled with it and pretty much got nowhere.

I thought that photography could start with addressing the  aesthetic concepts established during the Romantic era, and which framed the golden age of landscape painting and the visual arts in the nineteenth century; aesthetic concepts that divided the natural world into the 3 categories of the pastoral, the picturesque, and the sublime. The first two represent nature as a comforting source of physical and spiritual sustenance, whilst the sublime referred to the thrill and danger of confronting untamed nature and its overwhelming forces, such as thunderstorms, alps and deep chasms. 

Whilst both the pastoral and picturesque reference human kind’s ability to control the natural world pastoral landscapes celebrate the dominion of mankind over nature. The scenes, which are usually peaceful, often depicting ripe harvests, lovely gardens, manicured lawns with broad vistas, and fattened livestock, are in contrast to those of the court or the city. If the roots of the pastoral lie in a form of poetry that celebrates the pleasures and songs of the herdsmen, then this was steadily expanded to a representation of rural nature that exhibits the ideas and sentiments of those to whom the country affords pleasures and employment. Hence Constable’s landscape paintings of the English countryside.

agricultural landscape, Waitpinga, Fleurieu Peninsula

Human kind in colonial Australia has developed and tamed the landscape – the land yields the necessities we need to live, as well as beauty and safety. If Joseph Lycett established the pastoral landscape tradition in Australia, then Arthur Streeton’s ‘The purple noon’s transparent might’ is an iconic example of the representation of the Australian pastoral landscape. In this tradition of the Australian idealisation of settler landscapes — Australia as a Promised Land — Europeans are seen to be in harmony with a fertile land, a land which has been ordered and produced by them and in which they are able to experience leisure. This involved the masking and displacing of environmental pillage and political conquest by nostalgic valuations of the very spaces and biosystems that were being destroyed. This settler pastoralism denies and conceals the colonial exploitation and the dispossession and the genocide of the First Nations people.

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architecture, landscape, topographics

exploring the Mt Lofty Ranges

March 10, 2022

Earlier this week I decided to do a little road trip in South Australia by picking up from where I left off in the 1980s exploration of the eastern Mt Lofty Ranges. I drove up to Palmer via Monarto and concentrated on the area around Milendella. This is on the Murray plains or lands to the east of the Mount Lofty Ranges in South Australia and it was once a stop on the Sedan railway line.

From there I drove a little way up Gap Rd into the Ranges, stopped, then looked back from the eastern edge of the Ranges across the Murray Plains. This was once Mallee country.

Murray Plains

This scoped picture looks to be a possibility for some b+w photos using the 5×7 Cambo monorail. This was the camera I was using to photograph with in the 1980s when I lived in Adelaide. Then I entered the Mt Lofty Ranges via Mt Pleasant and Palmer from Adelaide I didn’t really explore the eastern side of the Ranges, or the relationship between the Ranges and the Murraylands or plains. The key problem that I will face in exploring this possibility is the strong winds — the sou’ easterlies and the sou’ westerlies — that make large format photography difficult, if nigh on impossible.

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critical writing, landscape, large format

Why not eco-photography?

February 4, 2022

(This post was cross posted to View Camera Australia. The post on View Camera Australia includes David Tatnall’s images).

A fascinating and informative interview with David Tatnall by Michéla Griffith in issue 245 of the British based On Landscape magazine about the process of photographing nature with large format cameras raises an interesting question as well as some issues about natural beauty and politics and art. This is a different pathway for photography to that opened up by a poetic photography, and it is one that its roots in the tradition of landscape photography in Australia. It brings a critical perspective into a tradition that suffers from a lack of writing and debate about its raison d’etre  over and above posting images on social media.

The question raised in the interview is: Why is an eco-photography as distinct from landscape photography not widely recognized in photographic culture? Where are photography’s postcards from the Anthropocene that emerge from its encounters with the Anthropocene-in-the-making? The question is asked because there is a recognized eco-philosophy, even if remains marginal in academia; one that in Australia which has its roots in Val and Richard Routley’s The Fight for the Forest (1973) — the book that launched the struggle to protect Australia’s old growth native forests. This environmental philosophy becomes an eco-philosophy that is critical of the nature/culture dualism; explores the revaluing our relationship to nature in the context of an ecological crisis caused by climate heating in the era of the Anthropocene; and recognizes the Whanganui River in NZ as a living being and one that has been granted legal personhood.

Otway National Park, Victoria

So why is there not a recognized ecologically oriented-photography as opposed to landscape photography; an eco-photography that interrogates, expands, understands and influences our relationship with nature in transformation? An eco-photography that has affinities with an eco-philosophy’s recognition of the limitations of economics and its concern to heal a wounded world and is willing to rethink the landscape in the Anthropocene rather than default to a default reading of landscape.

We no longer live in the Holocene or the culture of the nineteenth century when relations between humans and nature seemed clear: nature was separate to humans and it was natural, beautiful, untouched. In the 21st century humans can no longer be defined as separate to the world around us. It is also recognized that a wilderness landscape photography of an uncontaminated and entirely pure nature in Australia was blind to the aboriginal occupation of the land for 50-60,000 thousand years prior to the British colonization in the late 18th century. With the wide recognition that one of the consequences of economic development has been widespread environmental damage to the country and the native old growth forests and the emergence of an Anthropocene or planetary aesthetics, then why no eco-photography?

In his interview Tatnall says that his approach to photographing nature has its roots in his early desire to see more green on the map meaning more national parks that protected the land. He adds that this desire to preserve nature through national parks was strengthened by the campaign to save Lake Pedder in Tasmania in the 1970s and the threats to the native forests in East Gippsland in Victoria in the 1980s.

He adds that the protection of Australia’s unique landscape is important, and that his motivation for his photography is being able to say something about our fragile environment by making a photograph that has an impact and meaning. This “saying something about” is based on an understanding of place that comes from spending time in that place — in Tatnall’s words “going into nature is to be in nature and if I make a photograph, it’s a bonus.”

This implies an awareness that nature has become enmeshed within our understandings of what it is to be human, and it sounds like an eco-photography, rather than a landscape photography. I would suggest that such a distinction is plausible, reasonable and necessary in the light of the body of work produced by Joyce Campbell. An eco-photography that is aware the signature of the Anthropocene appears in the geological strata: in the ice cores of the rapidly melting Arctic, the agricultural sediments accumulating in the Yellow Sea, the shifting of atmospheric gases in Antarctica and the bushfires in Australia and California.

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abstraction, exhibitions, landscape, rocks

Photography, Landscape, Place

September 24, 2021

I have a few photos in this multimedia group Rock, Stone, Earth exhibition of rocks from the northern Flinders Ranges to the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. The exhibition is curated by Janine Baker and Stephen Johnson, it is at the Onkaparinga Art Centre in Port Noarlunga, and it is being opened by Vic Waclawik on Sunday 26th September.

Featured artists are: Quentin Gore, Stephen Skillitzi, the late Władysław Dutkiewicz, John Richardson, Adam Dutkiewicz, Janette Humble, Deborah Odell, Gary Sauer-Thompson, Tina Moore, Stephen Johnson and Janine Baker.

My photos of  rocks include those large format ones made from the daily poodlewalks  in  the area between Petrel Cove and Kings Headon the southern Fleurieu Peninsula; secondly,  those from the Flinders Ranges made whilst I was on  camel treks in South Australia (one  to Mt Hopeless in 2018 and one from Blinman to Lake Frome in 2021); and thirdly, those made on walks in the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges National Park in 2021.

The rocks in the northern Flinders Ranges are very old — some dating back to before the lower Cambrian period with its explosion of life after the great glaciation of the planet. The Flinders Ranges contain an exceptional and unique geological heritage. This geological heritage with its Ediacaran fossils is the basis for the nomination of the Flinders Ranges for world heritage listing.

rock face, Waitpinga, South Australia

This heritage is based on a depositional system known as the Adelaide Rift Complex or Adelaide Superbasin, which includes the Fleurieu Peninsula and Kangaroo Island. The latter experienced a mountain building period around 500 million years ago that caused a substantial folding, buckling and faulting of the strata.

The rocks I photographed can be contextualized and linked by the geology of the Adelaide Superbasin in South Australia. The sedimentary rocks of the basin were deposited in a depression during the breakup of the supercontinent of Rodinia. The nature of the rocks suggest they were deposited in a mostly marine environment — a shallow sea — approximately 870 to 500 million years ago.

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