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at Andamooka

March 14, 2016

The blurb for Lars Heldmann’s fascinating ouThere photography exhibition at the South Coast Regional Art Gallery (Old Goolwa Police Station) of the mining towns and landscapes in and around Roxby Downs , Andamooka and Cooper Pedy in northern South Australia says that the images in the exhibition “give us access to the remote and vast interior, which is in contrast to our living environment along the coast and interior waters.” It is an interesting attempt to uncover the missing narratives of our regional pastas well as a search for things that many of us in Adelaide did not know existed. The art works of this region are few and far between. I know of no reclamation art that has been produced by the visual arts community, or any rehabilitation work done by landscape architects.

The ouThere exhibition reminded me of my images of Andamooka. So I went back to the archive and had a look at the images that were probably made around the beginning of the 21st century. We spent several days at Andamooka, but we never took the opportunity to go on to explore Lake Torrens National Park to the east, nor drive north to Marree, which is at the junction of the Oodnadatta Track and the Birdsville Track. The reason was that we were tourists, travelling in a little Ford Laser, without access to a 4 wheel drive.

petrol pump, Andamooka

The odd image from my Andamooka work has made its way into the Regional Landscapes: South Australia and Edgelands portfolios.

I didn’t see this part of South Australia as the unknown or the Australian Outback. People live and work here. For instance, the nearby town of Woomera was a military town, whilst Roxby Downs and Andamooka are mining landscapes and towns –industrial and pre-industrial. Andamooka, at that time, was more or less, a declining shanty town with abandoned mining shafts, since the opal field was mined out during the 1970’s. There was little sign of the Aboriginal people who would have had a long-standing connection with the area. Continue Reading…

architecture, film, topographics, urban

Fleurieuscapes: Outtake 2

January 4, 2016

This image is an outtake from the 15 images that have been selected for my forthcoming Fleurieuscapes exhibition at the Magpie Springs Gallery in January 2016. A previous outtake from the exhibition can be seen on this post on the Encounter Studio blog.

Elephants trunk, Victor Harbor

Although I was quite partial to it, my friends who were kindly acting as de facto curators for the exhibition rejected it. I am sentimentally attached to the image as my architectural representations of Victor Harbor are few and far between. There isn’t that much to work with in this coastal township, architecturally speaking, and I thought it was a good way to explore the people, place, space theme of the exhibition. Continue Reading…

architecture, colour, film, topographics

silo, Cowangi, Mallee Highway

October 29, 2015

I’ve finally scanned the medium format negatives from the scoping I did for the silo project whilst I was returning to Adelaide from the Canberra trip, as well as those made in the Wimmera when I was returning to Adelaide from being at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale. This project evokes the solitary road trip and cross-country journeys, as a working model of photography without the 35mm “grab-shot” style that captured flux and contradictions of modern life with a fresh immediacy. It is a winter project, given the summer heat in the Mallee.

This is an image of a silo at Cowangie, in the Victorian part of the Malle Highway made with an old, mechanical handheld Rolleiflex SL66. The picture that I also made whilst I was scoping with the digital camera at the same time can be seen here.

silo, Cowangie, Mallee Highway

This photography of contemporary, rural Australian Mallee is in the topographical style–an Australian topographics. It is how I would make the picture in black and white using the 8×10 Cambo monorail: straight on to the object, with cloud cover, gentle light and some context to the landscape. I wish that I ‘d taken the picture with the 8×10 then and there; but at the time when I was in the field, I wasn’t sure of the right perspective to adopt. Hence the number of different interpretations I made with a digital camera. I then had to see them on the computer screen to be able to judge which of the various interpretations was the most appropriate.

The photograph endeavours to avoid being nostalgic about the Australian Mallee and its fading small farm past to concentrate more on the object. It is akin to the work of Brend and Hilla Becher, with their connection to Minimalism and Conceptual Art and their systematic series or typologies industrial architecture. Their pictures of the architecture (eg., coal bunkers and pit heads) showed a resource industry that was visibly defunct and dying, instead of the glimpses of hope of a thriving, developing nation that was evident in the 1970s American New Topographics.
Continue Reading…

colour, film, landscape, nature, topographics

On Ghostly nature

October 11, 2015

On Friday evening, after picking up my negatives from the Atkins Photo Lab for the Yellow Competition and those made on my recent trips to Canberra and Ballarat, I went to the opening of Ghostly Nature – part 2 at the Adelaide Town Hall. This exhibition, which is curated by Polly Jean Dance, as part of the Adelaide City Council’s innovative Emerging Curator Program, builds on her earlier Ghostly Nature Part One exhibition. Ghostly Nature – part 2 is an exploration of the dark and haunted side of our natural landscape that asserts itself in often mysterious, yet magical ways.

The image below is not from either of the Ghostly nature exhibitions at the Adelaide Town Hall. It is one of mine, and it is a picture of the Mt Lyell Open Cut mine in Queenstown, Tasmania, that is a part of the Edgelands body of work. I’ve introduced the image into this post to suggest that Polly Dance’s concept of the dark and haunted side of our natural landscape that asserts itself in often mysterious, yet magical ways refers to the sublime.

Mt Lyell Mine, Tasmania

It is good to see this reclaiming of the aesthetic concept of the sublime by Adelaide’s curators, since the sublime is predominantly an aesthetic category relating to nature and the concept has been used too little by Anglo-American philosophers who have largely forgotten this aesthetic category. A good case can be made that the neglect of the concept by Anglo-American aestheticians is unjustified: sublime responses, especially to natural environments, are still with us today, and may be even more frequent than in former times.

The Ghostly nature exhibition implies that its working understanding of the sublime goes beyond Edmund Burke’s concept of it in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) as a largely non-cognitive, affective arousal to one that understands the sublime response as including, in addition to this affective arousal, an intellectual play with ideas involving especially ideas regarding the place of human beings within the environment.
Continue Reading…

architecture, digital, history, topographics

history and architecture

September 24, 2015

It is not possible for me, living in South Australia as I do, to make large format photos of empty city streets as Thomas Struth did with his Dusseldorf and New York work; a body of work that explored the relationship between the unconscious and the past and sought to represent within the visible cityscape the hidden impulses and forces which have shaped the city. His compositions are simple and the photographs are neither staged nor digitally manipulated in post-production. Strong contrasts of light and shade are also avoided, Struth preferring the greyish, uninflected light of early morning.

Adelaide has limited architecture for this older tradition of urban architectural/street photography with its pictorial strategy of a central perspective and foregrounding background, that recalls the nineteenth-century Parisian vistas of French photographers Eugène Atget and Charles Marville. However, the social and historical institutional context of the architecture and the deserted town can be achieved with the country towns in the Victorian and South Australian Mallee since history and architecture are intertwined here:

Clarkes cornerstore, Cowangie

Many of the regional towns in the Victorian and South Australian Mallee have changing population compositions, with some localities experiencing decline. The small country towns in the Mallee, for instance are struggling to stay alive. Some are changing from being agricultural service towns to tourist towns, but for many of the smaller towns along the Mallee Highway there isn’t much tourism happening. People pretty much drive through these towns on their way to Canberra or Sydney.

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