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architecture, critical writing, history

Siegfried Kracauer on photography

July 10, 2016

In his    early writings  (that is, his feuilletons written during the 1920’s and 1930s) in Germany, Siegfried Kracauer explored the cultural landscape of industrial capitalism in the early 20th century. The feuilletons, which were  eventually collected into two books—The  Ornament of the Masses and Streets of Berlin and Elsewhere—- decoded the surface phenomena of modernity as complex historical ciphers—surfaces subject to interpretation.  These  were interpreted as symptoms of  larger sociopolitical developments, such as  the evacuation of meaning in the daily life and  the popular culture of  modernity. These writings are a form of cultural criticism in the business of theorizing the present.

Adelaide CBD, 2.20pm

Adelaide CBD, 2.20pm

The underlying  argument  in these writings  has its roots in Nietzsche, Weber and Lukas. History in modernity was seen as a process  of disenchantment (demythologising) and a crisis emerged during this process because modern rationality was yoked to capitalist relations of production,  becomes an abstract rationality  that mythologizes the relations of production in industrial capitalism and the conditions of life that result from them as  if they were unchanging nature. Contemporary actuality turns out to be shadowy and insubstantial, a chaos without soul or meaning, whose absurdity can only be represented in a distorted image. We are isolated and homeless, suspended in a void, and stifled by the law-like regularities of a reality we ourselves have created which is fundamentally alien to meaning. Ours is a world fused by the absence of truth, plunged into a state of angst.

The essays or feuilletons map the return of myth across a wide spectrum of high and popular culture in the Weimar Republic. The inconspicuous, quotidian expressions of a culture reveal more about it than its own self-pronouncements. Everyday phenomena such as photos or the nature of popular literature and film are unmediated representations of a culture.  As part of this Kracauer  explored the relationship between visual culture,  art, photography and modernity in the essays such as The Mass Ornament and  On Photography   The photograph for  Kracauer, as for Georg Simmel, captures a true likeness, a faithful representation, a simple copy of figures, objects and scenes.   Photography’s  strength is that it  captures the actual appearances of people and the surfaces of things  but  its weakness is its failure to penetrate beneath these exterior manifestations.  So the photograph is hollow,  empty and mechanical. Without a supporting history or a memory that is associated with the subject matter photography is  not adequate to recreate an understanding of the event. Continue Reading…

colour, digital, history, landscape, ruins, topographics

at Lake Albert

April 10, 2016

After attending  the Centre of  Culture,  Land and Sea’s   informative workshop at Meningie in South Australia.  I used the opportunity  to explore around  Lake Albert and the Narrung Peninsula with its legacy of settler agriculture before driving on  down to Salt Creek  for a photoshoot for the Edgelands project.

Lake Albert, along with Lake Alexandrina,   is a part of the Lower Lakes of the River Murray,  and  is adjacent to the northern lagoon’s eco-system of the Coorong. Being at the bottom end of the highly engineered River Murray,  Lake Albert  suffers from the river’s  minimal environmental flows.  Those at the  terminus of the River Murray receive what is left over after consumptive use in the Murray-Darling Basin.

 Though  the  Barrages at Goolwa were constructed to maintain the Lakes as freshwater systems at a constant water depth, the Lakes/Coorong region is  at the end of a major river systems, which  means that this region is highly sensitive to changes in freshwater flows. Despite the Basin Plan, which has addressed the overallocation of water  from the Basin’s rivers  by irrigated agriculture,  not enough fresh water currently flows into Lake Albert  to flush the lake  out,  so it is salty,  and all the  contaminants from the upper part of the river end up in Lake Albert.
Lake Albert, South Australia

Lake Albert, South Australia

The irrigators around  Lake Albert suffered from a lack of water during the Millennium Drought (from 2002- 2010)—-when Lake Albert was closed off from natural river flows by a Government constructed band at the entrance top the Lake.   Exposure and oxidation of acid sulfate soils due to falling water levels from 2007-2009 in the Lower River Murray and Lower Lakes also resulted in acidification of soils, lake and ground water. The low water levels on Lake Albert  resulted in many of the dairy farmers, who had  relied on pumped water from Lake Albert,   being  forced to sell their cattle and even abandon their dairy farms. Continue Reading…

coastal, film, history, landscape

a road trip with an 8×10

March 29, 2016

I am  planning a  large-format road trip  to the Coorong where I will work  with the 8×10 Cambo monorail,  black and white film, and one 300mm  normal lens.  I will also have a 5×4  field camera  with me to use with colour film and for when I am walking through the wetlands. The photo trip  is to build material for  the second part of  the Edgelands project.

I will attend a workshop at Meningie run by the Centre  for Culture, Land and Sea on the ecological state of the River Murray  and Coorong on Sunday 3rd April. I will then drive to, and  base myself at Salt Greek for  3 days.  The work  from this roadtrip will be part of a group exhibition at the South Coast Regional Arts Centre (in the historic Old Goolwa Police Station building).    The exhibition is a part of the Alexandrina Council’s  2016 ‘Just Add Water’ program.

melaleuca, Coorong

melaleuca, Coorong

Before you think a road trip with an 8×10 monorail   is crazy,  here is  a precedent from the 1980s:  then Doug Spowart (using a  Sinar P 8×10) and Maris Rusis (he was Queensland’s only committed 10×8 image-making practitioner at the time)  did a road trip from Brisbane to Canberra, Kosciuszko and Suggan Buggan in the late 1980’s with 8×10 monorails.  Continue Reading…

history, landscape, nature, topographics

Land Dialogues

March 23, 2016

There is a forthcoming conference on Land Dialogues at the Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga,  NSW, Australia.  It is an interdisciplinary approach to place/space and human/non-human convergence discourses. The conference blurb says that this involves the following themes:

(1) Analysis or application of existing or emergent dialogues with land in indigenous, pre-colonial, post-colonial and anti-colonial contexts.(2) Explorations of the limits (or perceived limits) of sustainment principles, sustainabilities, ecologies and agriculture.(3) New/Old Frontiers, Land and the Digital and explorations of, or reflections on potentials for new topographies including data visualisations in relationship to land. (4) Experimental or experiential works or non-standard items including exhibition or performance towards dialogue with land.

Theme (4) includes  a photographic exhibition  that is curated by James Farley  entitled Land Dialogues – Contemporary Australian Photography (in Dialogues with Land). The Photographers involved include  Christine McFetridge,  Kate Robertson,  Renata Buziak, James Farely,  Chris Orchard, Jacob Raupach, Felix Wilson, Carolyn Young and Amy Findlay. However,  it is unclear what kind of dialogue with the land these photographers are engaged in since there is no curatorial statement online apart from the general statement that photographers involved are  exploring and reevaluating how the Australian community identifies, represents and values the spaces that we create and occupy. Surprisingly, there no abstracts of the conference papers online.
Currently we have a vacuum about the nature of dialogues with nature in contemporary photography within the gallery system that was once premised on the modernist divide of nature and culture as mutually exclusive.  Nature was landscape rather than country, and nature existed in a repressed state in the galleries through the 1980s and early 1990s. So what kind of dialogues with nature are happening in the second decade of the 21st century, given that agricultural industrialisation, which  was an early cornerstone of Australian modernity, has left us with parched catchment areas, salt encrusted soil  and degraded rivers?
My own work in the Edgelands project —here and here —-can be considered to be a dialogue with the land as opposed to country.  This image of the Murrumbidgee  River near Hay  is an example:
Murrumbidgee River

Murrumbidgee River

The Murrumbidgee River runs through Wagga Wagga and it is  the second largest source of water flows into the Murray-Darling system. The 1,600 km long river is ranked as one of the two least ecologically healthy of 23 tributary rivers in the Basin.  Lake Burley Griffin, which is a part of  the upper Murrumbidgee,  is pretty much a  fetid carp pond.  By the mid 1970s, almost all of the water in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area had been allocated to irrigators, and today we are seeing an example of  river system collapse with the signs of an ecological disaster are all too clear.

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Art, critical writing, history

Brisbane photography circa 1993

January 30, 2016

I have never seen any copies of Doug Spowart’s  Photo.Graph that was published in the 1990s or the earlier News Sheet apart from a post  on the Brisbane Photography Scene 1993 written by Ian Poole on  the wotwedid blog that Spowart runs with  Victoria Cooper.  It’s a pity because Photo.Graph  was designed to fill a gap in the discussion, critique and commentary about a segment of the photography discipline within Australia.

Carl Warner, untitled, 1996/1997

Carl Warner, untitled, 1996/1997

 

Poole is a familiar  figure  in photographic culture because he is a cross over between an advertising /commercial photographer (20 years) and an exhibiting art photographer. Familiar in the sense that  art photography in the 1970s and 1980s was kicked started by advertising /commercial photographer   starting to teach at art schools and private photography schools. Athol Smith and John Cato in Melbourne are good examples of this figure.  Poole is different  to them in that he had a post-graduate degree in visual arts from Griffith University. So he is well placed  to assess Brisbane photography in the early 1990s.

The article is starting point  for a discussion about Queensland contemporary art  photo practice and its a  survey of events by the individual  commercial and art  photographers working in Brisbane and Queensland in 1993 –their exhibitions, travels, plans  and books– just over  a decade  before the formation of the Queensland Centre of Photography.  One of the photographers mentioned by Poole was Marion Drew. Others were Carl Warner and Richard Stringer.  All are currently practising. What the article  indicates is that photography was flourishing in the city of Brisbane in the early 1990s under  the Labor government of Wayne Goss. The corruption that  had  gone on so long under a National Party Government of Bjelke-Petersen  in the Moonlight State was in the past. Brisbane was no longer  a big country town.

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