film – Page 6 – Thought Factory

architecture, colour, film, history, urban

image-movement

October 7, 2015

One shift happening in how we understand photography within the image sphere of late modernity is the emerging recognition that the photographic image—and the image in general— is not an archetype and it is no longer something immobile like a Platonic Form. The image is not outside history and independent, or floating above its context as held by the modernist formalism of Clement Greenberg. The mythical fixity of the image has been broken.

As Giorgio Agamben notes, in sympathy with Gilles Deleuze, the image is mobile: it is an image-movement in the sense that the image is charged with a dynamic tension; a dynamic tension that embodies the movement of history. Our historical experience is obtained by photographic images and photographic images are expressions of our lived history. The image is a still from history and it enters into a constellation with other images.

Grote St, Adelaide

A corresponding shift is the rupture away from the traditional conception of expression assumed in communication in which all expression is realised by a medium—an image or a word or colour—in which the medium disappears in the fully realised expression. The medium is no longer perceived as such–we no longer notice the medium as it disappears in that which it gives us to see. The expression shines forth.

The shift away from this conception is towards a realisation that the image as medium does not disappear into what it makes visible. The image is seen as an image rather than disappearing; or being utterly dependent on the particularity of its context. The image is a kind of force field that holds together opposing forces.
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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.
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architecture, black + white, film

The silo project

August 17, 2015

On my first exploratory photo trip to Canberra I picked up on some work I’d started many years ago with the Cambo 5×7 monorail –photographing in the Murray Mallee and concentrating on the grain silos along the old railway lines. I had an old VW Kombi then and I used to be able to get away from Adelaide and go on road trips with the Cambo in a trunk. I recall a weekend photographing around Mantung in the Murray Mallee, with its old railway line that went from Karoonda to Waikerie. All that stopped when I was doing my PHD in philosophy at Flinders University. I just had no time for large format photography and darkrooms.

silo, SA Mallee

However, the road trip, the Mallee, and silos stayed in the back of my mind.I kept on looking at the few images I had from that time on the computer. When we travelled to and from Ballarat for the Ballarat International Foto Biennale in 2013 I saw the silos on the Dukes and Western Highway and thought they would make a good subject using the 8×10 Cambo and black and white film. The silo project emerged.
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abstraction, colour, film

what if photography embraces abstraction

July 19, 2015

As is well known, the orthodox modernist response to photography’s taking away the responsibility for representational content from painting was an affirmative withdrawal into painterly autonomy through abstraction in the form or spiritual or painterly values. The more radical avant-grade response was the rejection of painting altogether in the the form of the readymade. Photography was seen to have usurped painting’s aspiration to objectivity in painting’s older tradition of the naturalistic representational function. That left photography’s representations as truth telling.

container abstract

Most of the critical emphasis to this crisis of painting in the 20th century has been on painting and the way that photography is used as a ready-made source for paintings i.e. painting as photo painting. But what if photography starts working with abstractions in the form of painterly values? Does that negation of painting’s specificity signify a failure to reconcile art and politics? Does it imply a turning to high culture and the traditional values of art and a rejection of non art and popular culture where most of today’s photography is situated? Is it a response to the anti-aesthetics of the 1980s and 1990s that celebrated cultural and vernacular forms that denied the idea of a privileged aesthetic realm?; an anti-aesthetic that is willing to discard the aesthetic as an outmoded modernist category in its desire to overcome modernist formalism.
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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.
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