history – Page 4 – Thought Factory

Traumatic history

January 25, 2016

This picture made in the Namadgi National Park is from the dark landscapes projected it is of a traumatic event–the Canberra bush fire. It is also a place of collective memory of the Canberra bushfire of 2003, which was the first confirmed case of a fire tornado in Australia, in which 4 people died, 490 were injured, over 500 homes destroyed, and 164,000 hectares burnt. That burnt area was close to 70% of the Territories total area.

burnt tree, Namadgi National Park

It is a site of traumatic history, and it is a photograph made of a place at which the bushfire event occurred over a decade before. As a photographer I came late to the scene and what is photographed is the remaining traces of the bush fire in the landscape. It is a photograph that was taken in a return to a location or site in the Namadgi National Park after the bush fire has happened, and it is made in response to the traces of this event in the landscape. 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…

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.
Continue Reading…

architecture, digital, history, topographics

history and architecture

September 24, 2015

It is not possible for me, living in South Australia as I do, to make large format photos of empty city streets as Thomas Struth did with his Dusseldorf and New York work; a body of work that explored the relationship between the unconscious and the past and sought to represent within the visible cityscape the hidden impulses and forces which have shaped the city. His compositions are simple and the photographs are neither staged nor digitally manipulated in post-production. Strong contrasts of light and shade are also avoided, Struth preferring the greyish, uninflected light of early morning.

Adelaide has limited architecture for this older tradition of urban architectural/street photography with its pictorial strategy of a central perspective and foregrounding background, that recalls the nineteenth-century Parisian vistas of French photographers Eugène Atget and Charles Marville. However, the social and historical institutional context of the architecture and the deserted town can be achieved with the country towns in the Victorian and South Australian Mallee since history and architecture are intertwined here:

Clarkes cornerstore, Cowangie

Many of the regional towns in the Victorian and South Australian Mallee have changing population compositions, with some localities experiencing decline. The small country towns in the Mallee, for instance are struggling to stay alive. Some are changing from being agricultural service towns to tourist towns, but for many of the smaller towns along the Mallee Highway there isn’t much tourism happening. People pretty much drive through these towns on their way to Canberra or Sydney.

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