publishing Archives - Thought Factory

exhibitions, photography, publishing, South Australia

Adelaide Art Photographers + Covid-19 lockdown

April 13, 2020

I was absent from the book launch and the exhibition opening of Adelaide Art Photographers c1970-2000 at the Royal South Australian Society of Arts in Adelaide. It took place just after Australia had put in place the Covid-19 restrictions for social distancing and social gatherings. I was in New Zealand at the time trying to return to Australia before New Zealand closed its borders. After I returned to Adelaide I went into the 14 day mandatory quarantine. After the quarantine finished we entered a world of lockdown to ‘flatten the curve’ of infections to prevent overloading the health system. The lockdown tempo was set by NSW and Victoria, the two worst affected states.

I have yet to see the exhibition and the books are largely unsold.

The background to the Adelaide Art Photographer’s project is here.

Due to the Covid -19 restrictions the opening was sparsely attended, the book launch was minimal, and the exhibition was opened only for a few hours. Then everything was closed down. However, the exhibition does have some online presence. There are the exhibition images, a walk through of the exhibition images by Paul Atkins and Adam Dutkiewicz and the exhibition opening address by Paul Atkins. Meanwhile the pandemic rages on, many lives are on pause, while many others end.

Adelaide, archives, black + white, critical writing, photography, publishing

Adelaide Art Photographers 1970-2000

October 23, 2019

Whilst I was working on the Mallee Routes photobook for the December exhibition at the Murray Bridge Regional Gallery I was also working with Adam Dutkiewicz to complete the Adelaide Art Photographers book –forementioned in blog posts here and here–for Moon Arrow Press. The book is nearly finished. Adam and I visited the printers —Openbook Howden— in Adelaide yesterday to sort out some technical details, obtain a quote, and have a sample print of the cover made to check the blacks and the appearance of the font.

There is still some fine tuning to be done, but we expect the pdf to be sent to the printers towards mid-November, with the book printed by Xmas. It will be launched in early March 2020 at an exhibition of photos in the book at the Royal South Australian Society of Arts in Adelaide. Copies can be purchased earlier through Moon Arrow Press.

This is the revised front cover of Adelaide Art Photographers with its referencing the 35mm Kodak film strips of the 20th century without its flap:

The book is a companion volume to the previously published Abstract Photography (2017) by Moon Arrow Press in 2017. The Adelaide Art Photographers book is around 180 pages. There are 20 photographers who have 6 pages for their portfolios and 1 page for their profiles. There is also an essay on aesthetics, which is understood in terms of a critical philosophy of art in the cultural context of the anti-aesthetic. The latter understood aesthetics to mean judgements of taste about the formal beauty of art; with the modernist autonomy of art being understood as a (negative) freedom of art from social determination in a capitalist society.

The anti-aesthetic movement in this period was reacting against Greenberg’s modernist reinterpretation of aesthetic autonomy into the task of medium self-definition through purification. This was via the transposition of the concept of aesthetic autonomy into a linguistic register in literary modernism–with T. S. Elliot being the main influence on Greenberg here. This modernism rejects the past, established art forms and their typical ways of being practiced in favour of some new manner of art making; it affirm this new manner as the uniquely appropriate way, of practicing a kind of art expressive of the modern world.

New Zealand, publishing, urban, Wellington

Reconnections: Walking Wellington

March 7, 2019

I have spent the last couple of months working on the Reconnections: Walking Wellington project. This is based on my walking Wellington around the time of Photobooks/NZ in 2018 and on my previous visits. These visits were designed for me to walk Wellington.

It has initially been constructed in the form of a Tumblr blog. The blog is here and the project starts from the bottom of p. 4. The impetus for the project was Photoforum NZ’s recent open call for submissions for their online gallery (images of the project only), and then their call for submissions the form of a pdf for their publications programme (text plus images).

The blog was the easiest way for me to construct the project fragment by fragment, and it is also provides an accessible way for people to see the project in its embryonic form. The picture below is an outtake from the project:

Massey Uni, Wellington

There is another outtake here. Another outake is here.

If these submissions are not successful– I am assuming that they wont be, given both the nature of publishing in Australia and New Zealand and the strength and creativity of photography in New Zealand —then I have the basic draft for a new photobook. This time around I will submit the pdf to various book publishers. If I am not successful, then, and only then, will I consider publishing it on my own. I do need to explore the submissions route and experience the normal series of rejections. Continue Reading…

New Zealand, photography, publishing, Wellington

Photobook-NZ

March 30, 2018

I made a quick return to Wellington just after my walking Wellington trip to take part in Photobook-NZ book fair that was organized by Photoforum in association with the photography stream of the College of Creative Arts at Massey University and Te Papa. I didn’t participate in the masterclass for creating and publishing photobooks, nor did I submit a photobook for the New Zealand Photobook of the Year Awards. I missed the talks by Bryan Schutmaat, Carolle Bénitah and Athol McCredie at Te Papa on the Saturday as I had to mind my little stall in the book fair at Te Papa. The books on my stall included Edgelands, Abstract Photography and Mallee Routes: Photographing the Mallee 2018. Surprisingly, the book of mine that people were the most interested in was the Abstract Photography book.

I attended the opening on Friday night at Te Papa, heard the Peter Turner Memorial Lecture given by Jem Southam on the Saturday night, spend the Sunday at Massey University listening to the talks and panel discussions, reconnected with Sally Jackman (an old friend who I hadn’t seen since my time in Melbourne in the 1970s) on the Sunday night, and photographed around Newton on Monday. I flew back to Adelaide on Tuesday. All in all it was a wonderful and fruitful weekend.

Whakatane, New Zealand

The highlight of the Sunday session at Massey University for me was the talk by Katrin Koenning, a German photographer now based in Melbourne. The talk centred around the ongoing Indefinitely project, which is about the space created by her family’s migration. The notion underpinning this is that this space is not a vacuum or a void, but rather the creator of new narratives. This grew out of an earlier project Near, which was about Koenning’s migratory experience. What I found interesting in this body of work in her talk was the emphasis on emotionality, darkness, and strong contrasts between darkness and light in her pictures. Continue Reading…

Adelaide, architecture, critical writing, publishing, South Australia

Adelaide Photography 1970–2000

September 24, 2017

I have spent some time in the last week or so contacting people to invite them to participate in the Adelaide Photography 1970-2000 book that is to be produced by Adam Dutkiewicz and myself for Moon Arrow Press. This book builds on, or is a development from, the Abstract Photography book that we published in 2016, which recovered what was left of the abstract modernist work produced in the 1960s. These are companion volumes so to speak.

The result to the initial email that has been sent out has been positive, in that the people who have been contacted so far have all said yes. Several others are rather slow in responding to that email. However, the main problem that I have encountered at this stage has been finding the contact details for some of the names of the relevant people that have mentioned. As a result some people who made art photographs during that period will not be included. They disappear from our visual history.

Harts Mill, Port Adelaide

Adelaide Photography 1970-2000 is designed to fill in one of the many gaps of the national histories and timelines of art photography in Australia that leave out Adelaide. This gap, silence or absence gives the wrong impression, as it implies that nothing of interest happened in South Australia in art photography during the last quarter of the 20th century. The inference is that South Australia is just a fly over state, and if any photographic work happened during this period, it is provincial, and so of little interest with respect to the national canon. Hence the idea of alternate histories–namely a rethinking of Australian photographic history that questions our understanding and interpretation of the past.

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