I am creatively flat after returning from my trip to Lajamanu in the Tanami Desert, curating and showing in three exhibitions (Weltraum, Abstractions x 5 and Mallee Routes), which are now coming to a close, and publishing the Abstraction Photography book with Moon Arrow Press. I’m exhausted, in debt, with limited stocks of film in the fridge and limited money to buy more film.
What happens now? Apart from having a rest, going to the gym, and paying off my debts? Where to now with my photography?I do have the 15 Silos on the Mallee Highway project to complete, work to do on the Mallee Routes project for some exhibitions over the next couple of years, and return to the Fleurieuscapes project.
However, I am also thinking along the lines of producing more books of photographs. But which body of work to create photo-books with? One possibility is going through my archives of photos that I did in the 1980s and 1990s; not to mine them for material, but to see if the material that emerges from exploring the archives that has the possibility of constituting a body of work that could fit into a book on Adelaide photography during that period.
Onkaparinga River
This kind of project would be a filling in the gaps and recovering a lost history in the regional photographic culture in Adelaide during the photography boom. Currently, we only have a very fragmentary sense of the photography that happened in the last quarter of the twentieth century in this city. This was the period of the emergence of postmodernism and its constructed imagery (eg., Anne Zahalka, Fiona Hall and Bill Henson in Australia) and its play with, and appropriations of, already existing images; a theoretical engagement with the nature of photography’s visual language’; a more scholarly approach undertaken by masters and doctoral candidates at Australian universities; and the invention of an Australian photographic avant-garde. Continue Reading…