film – Page 5 – Thought Factory

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…

abstraction, colour, film

into the studio

November 14, 2015

When I was living in the Sturt St townhouse in Adelaide’s CBD some of our poodle walks in the Adelaide parklands involved me looking at the base of cut logs to photograph as well as the trunks of trees. The logs were from the cut down trees in the parklands, and they were scattered around the parklands to make the parklands more like the bush and less like a park.

I photographed the most interesting ones whilst on the walks but I’ve done nothing with these images. I wasn’t all that happy with what I’d done, but I felt that there was little that I could do with these found objects in the field. These logs were huge and they could not be bought to the makeshift studio at Encounter Bay.I continued with the open air studio after we moved to Victor Harbor as I realised that bringing back live cuttlefish and wet seaweed into the studio didn’t really work.

log abstract

Then I saw the work of Ed Douglas in his recent Some Connections exhibitions –he was doing the same thing that I was but he was working in the studio, using a large format camera and black and white film. Consequently, he had much greater control over his found subject matter— which he selected from the firewood that he had delivered to his property in the Adelaide Hills. The work was far more sophisticated and of much higher quality.

I have set up a primitive studio –Encounter Studio–at Victor Harbor. It is based around using one small window light, a Cambo heavy duty studio stand with 2 geared heads for view cameras and an 8×10 Sinar P. I’ve also just purchased a beat up (entry level) 5×4 Sinar F2 from Alex Gard in Tasmania. Though I have a started looking for objects to bring back into the studio to photograph –ie., materials from nature, eg., from both the beach and the bush—but so far I have found very little that is useful photography wise.

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.
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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?

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.
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