South Australia – Thought Factory

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

Roadside

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.

black + white, South Australia, trees, water

a post colonial photography?

May 28, 2023

I have recently been thinking about possible approaches to a postcolonial photography in the current geological era of the
Anthropocene. One approach I started to explore is the idea of a stained or dark pastoral.

Another possible approach is an eco-photography. The photo below is of a wetland in the Overland Corner Reserve that is adjacent to the River Murray in South Australia. The background to this approach is the environmental destruction carried out over generations by the settler colonists seeking to anglicize a country. Their view was that nature was an adversary to be subjugated and that this was a country to loot — a view that still around today with the multinational mining companies. Dried out wetlands are the scar of this landscape destruction:

This is another example from the same pre-Covid roadtrip. Another example is here.

On this roadtrip I was starting to look for and trace the overland route that had been used by the overlanders to bring stock to South Australia from Sydney in the early 1840s. I was starting to explore the Riverland region around Lake Bonney, connecting the route to known massacre sites. Then Covid happened and the momentum was lost.

Both of these photographic approaches are a critical perspective on the landscape tradition in Australia insofar as they start to trace and explore the negative consequences of colonial settlement on the country.

Covid-19,, South Australia, trees

Feature: Large format #2

April 18, 2021

This is the second post in the large format feature series on thoughtfactory.

The picture below was made in the local remnant bushland during the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 in the late afternoon. It was made with a Linhof Technika IV using Kodak Portra 160 ASA film.

From memory, during the national lockdown we were able to move up to 5km from our place of residence. This bushland was within that range. I visited it often, in the early morning and afternoon on the poodlewalks. I even made a video using my old iPhone 6.

coastal, Covid-19,, South Australia

Lockdown

November 19, 2020

There has been an outbreak of the Covid-19 virus in the northern suburbs of Adelaide in South Australia. These new cases are South Australia’s first without a known source of transmission since April 1 2020–7 months ago.

Known as the Parafields cluster it has been traced back to returned traveller from the UK, to a cleaner, on to two security guards and then into the community. The cleaner worked at a medi-hotel (a quarantine hotel) for Australians returning from overseas, and then transmitted to the cleaner’s extended family, some of whom worked as security guards. The particular strain of this virus is showing no symptoms for people who have become infected; it is highly contagious (it was transmitted from surfaces at the medi-hotel in the city); and the incubation is very short —down to 24 hours.

The state government, in response to this second wave, has instituted a very tough mandatory lockdown of the state at midnight on the 18th of November in an attempt to execute a six day circuit breaker, to get on top of the contact tracing and to get every single person that they can into a quarantine situation as quickly as possible. The lockdown is being used to contain the virus, where as in Europe governments only uses lockdowns when things are out of control

Basically we cannot leave our house for the next 6 days and only one person per household can leave the home once a day to visit the supermarket, or if they are in an emergency, or if their home is unsafe. Face masks are advised when in public but they are not mandatory.

Art, photography, South Australia

Light paths

October 1, 2020

As mentioned in this earlier blog post two possibilities that I have explored in reacting against Facebook’s data mining and surveillance capitalism was to start a newsletter and an online gallery. Two newsletters have been produced and there have been two online exhibitions at Encounters Gallery.

I am in the process of working on a third newsletter and the third online exhibition, which is one on abstractions in photography. I am a bit behind schedule due to Light Paths.

Light Paths is currently under construction. It is a community orientated website for art photographers in South Australia. It is currently in ‘coming soon’ mode, but it should ‘go live’ sometime during October. It is premised around the idea of encouraging art photographers to publish their work in progress re the current project they are working on (initially on the blog and then in a gallery); to go on 2 field trips per year; and to have an annual exhibition based on the work produced on and around those field trips.

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