coastal – Page 4 – Thought Factory

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…

coastal, colour, film, history, landscape

Fleurieuscapes + the Indigenous absence

November 26, 2015

I’ve started working on my forthcoming Fleuriescapes exhibition at the Magpie Springs Gallery in January/February 2016. The exhibition explores the Fleurieu Peninsula in terms of people, space and place as this opens up a way to gain a perspective on the white colonisation of the region and the contemporary Indigenous absence. The exhibition is the first step in this project about a region that markets itself as Adelaide’s holiday adventure playground.

The history of the Fleurieu Peninsula appears to be premised on the pioneer myth/legend based on the ingenuity hard work and adventurousness of the early settlers and the cultural extinction of the Ngarrindjeri people. An anthropologically constructed image of a southern Indigenous person in a possum skin cloak in the South Australian Museum comes to represent a ‘unique’, but extinct Indigenous presence in the heartland of the white Australian nation.

Starfish Hill

The story of modernity excludes Indigenous people. It produces a set of foundational myths that are written by signs of development such as the bridge, the jetty and the marina. They all represent the power of western technology to overwrite the ‘natural landscape’. This is the landscape in which Indigenous people and Indigenous interests have been traditionally located. It is assumed that the Indigenous place has been obliterated or covered over by the layers of progress. Continue Reading…

coastal, colour, film, landscape

photography and ugliness

October 22, 2015

I have noticed that there are a few recurring images in my archives of coastal erosion of the sand dunes in, and around, the Victor Harbor area of the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. Since these images are a part of The Littoral Zone they got me thinking about how to construct the series or as a book.

The initial thinking behind these images suggests that the recession of the sand dunes is due, by and large to storm surges which are causing the sand dunes to slowly recede, and that with climate change the sand dune shorelines around the Victor Harbor township and Hayborough will continue to recede. The categories associated with climate change assume that one of the consequences of climate change in the form of a warming world is rising sea levels and these, in turn, when coupled to storm surges cause the recession of the sand dunes along the coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula.

sand dune erosion

The other kind of thinking or the categories behind these discrete group of image is the assumption that a (self-conscious) photography as art is the voice of sensuous particularity against an abstract economic rationality. Photography as art is more than, and beyond, economic reason, the exchange value of the capitalist market, and photography as the avatar of modernity’s technological rationality, with its mechanical technique, automation and deskilling.

How do we make sense of these two modes of thinking: scientific theory and photography as art?

coastal, colour, film, landscape

cross processing film

September 9, 2015

Sometimes mistakes can happen with large format photography and you end up not being sure about the result of the mistake. Or what to do with the unpredictable and interesting results. My usual mistakes are light leaks, out of focus images or overexposed negatives.

A different kind of mistake that I recent experienced was when some of my 5×4 colour negatives that I’d made on a photo trip to Kangaroo Island in South Australia were cross processed by the photo lab as E6 chemistry instead of C-41. Cross processing is trade slang for putting a film through the wrong processing chemicals. Usually it involves processing E6 transparency film through the C41 process, and the results can be rather wacky.

The result of the mistakenly cross processing my colour negative film in E6 chemistry was a low contrast positive with a dominant colour cast–with this digital file it was orange:

Redbank, Kangaroo Island

I was taken back when I saw the results. Stunned, in fact. Then disappointed. My initial reaction was that all that work I’d done on the island had gone down the drain. I just wasn’t into special effects photography–ie., looking to achieve a muted image with low saturation, or surreal images and I realised just how straight or classical my large format photography is.
Continue Reading…

coastal, colour, film, landscape

at Victor Harbor: landscapes + phototrips

July 5, 2015

I have come to realise that one of the disadvantages of shifting from the CBD of Adelaide to Victor Harbor on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula coast is that my photographic subject matter has become rather restricted. It’s mostly landscape territory here as the coastal towns (Victor Harbor, Port Elliot, Middleton and Goolwa) are small, and do not have that much to offer by way of urban photography. I have done little exploration of the coastal urbanity, but its mostly landscapes-ie., the bush or the coast.

Kings Head, Victor Harbor

I did realise that this would be the case before we moved to the coast. My solution at the time was to make day trips to Adelaide to continuing to photograph in and around the CBD and to do more phototrips to Melbourne. I thought that the emphasis would be more on the latter, as I reckon I done enough photographing the CBD of Adelaide.
Continue Reading…

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