roadside

Roadside #2: unconcelament

October 28, 2024

A few more images from the archives of the minor Roadside project that I mentioned in an earlier post. The pictures in this post are of various patches of roadside vegetation in different parts of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. These various patches have been photographed because their appearance shows some density and life.

The project started after the wave anti-authorial arguments of post-structuralism and the anti-aesthetic arguments of the post-modernism at the October journal had receded. This was a time after art history’s linear narrative of photograph, which had been hegemonic, became exhausted and collapsed; when photography had become a mainstream artistic practice; and photography was no longer regarded as a medium apart from the other arts. The name for this current time is the post-historic or contemporary and it is an era of artistic plurality and open-ended diversity that is freed from externally imposed definitions.

The above photo of Strangeways Road was made during the winter months with this particular section of the road being bounded by the Spring Mount Conservation Park.The latter is a small area of stringybarks on top of a hill surrounded by agricultural land.

This section of the Strangeways Rd through the Spring Mount Conservation Park indicates a roadside that is protected, and so its health is in marked contrast with the poor state of the roadsides within the various agricultural landscapes in Waitpinga. So the patches of roadside vegetation whose appearances show some density and life are few and far between. The patches stand out because on some of back country roads the roadside vegetation is minimal to non-existent.

Anthropocene, film, roadside, South Australia, trees, walking

August 15, 2024

I have just re-discovered a fragmentary roadside project that has been going for a while in the background. It emerged whilst walking down the back country roads in my local area of Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula with the standard poodles in the early morning or the late afternoon. I had started to notice the roadside vegetation, its poor condition and its decline and I then started photographing it off and on. It became a collection of individual photographs.

It was only when I was going through the black and white archives on the iMac that I re-discovered this roadside project. The early archival photos for the Roadside project were black and white:

The focus of the project is the two sides of the road — ie., the public area that runs between the fenced, private agricultural land on either side of the road. So there is no trespassing on private property.

Roadside has affinities with, and refers back to, Joyce Evans’ black and white project entitled Edge of the Road that was made in the 1980/1990s and was exhibited at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne in 2013. Joyce Evans’ project was concerned about the edge of the road and with the lack of control and the potential of chance using the Widelux F7 35mm panoramic camera’s inherent capabilities to image the minutiae of the world. Evans says that using “the camera’s capacity to see detail, which in the 60th of a second of the firing of the shutter my subconscious may perceive, but may not fully know.” Her concern is with the power of the edge of the image to relate to what was not shown in the image. What is shown by Evans in this threshold space of the edge of the road are booted footprints, barbed wire, gravel roads, dustbins, tyre tracks, hub caps, cigarette butts, spiders home, an intruding foot, and the fecund compost under snow laden ferns.