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.
Strangeways Rd, Spring Mount CP
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.
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 theRoadside project were black and white:
Roadside #1 Baum Rd
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.
Ian Lobb’s black and white landscapes in his Black Range (State Park, Victoria) series opens up the possibility for a contemporary landscape photography in Australia in the early 21st century after the demise of modernism and the decay of postmodernism. Lobb worked on the Black Range series throughout the 1986-1996 market bubble decade. These intimate photographs of the Victorian bush within the image economy of a globalized world were interpreted by Helen Ennis, the then Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Art, as metaphors for psychological and spiritual states. The aesthetic background of the styles, mediums and concerns in Australia in this period is succinctly outlined by Terry Smith in this interview.
My contrasting interpretation of Lobb’s smallscale and localized Black Range landscape series is that it is part of the displacement of the modernist emphasis on photography being part of the grand narrative of the avant-garde breaking new ground in terms of art historical style. It also part of the displacement of the critical postmodernist emphasis on pastiche, parody, appropriation and a free floating simulacral world of signs disconnected from real physical objects. Several diverse strands of contemporary art emerged in the clearing opened up this displacement, and the smallscale and localized artmaking exemplified by Lobb’s modest Black Range photos, was identified by Terry Smith in his What is Contemporary Art? as one of the 3 main currents of contemporary art in the early decades of the 21st century.
Waitpinga bushland, Heysen Trail
My interpretation holds that the significance of Lobb’s contemporary Black Range landscapes is that this series highlights place (topos); place in the sense of Lobb being in a local place that he understood and knew very well from his frequent visits. Place is that within which we are at homeor within which we dwell, and to dwell is to be located in a harmonious relationship with one’s surrounding environment. Lobb’s intimate landscapes shows both that he was at home in the Black Range bushland and that his photography was a form of placemaking. They open up a pathway for others to begin to walk along.
In contrast to many of Melbourne’s art photographers, who relate to Ian Lobb as the master fine printer with his worthy emphasis on the beautifully crafted print, I connected to his smallscale and modest landscape photos of the local Black bush. My interpretation of this body of work as opening up a pathway for a contemporary landscape photography is that it suggests that such a photography is of the present, but one that newly mobilizes the past tradition of landscape photography. A photography that is of the present but is not out of date, doesn’t have a backward looking orientation, nor is it nostalgic.
loose bark, Waitpinga bushland
Lobb’s Black Range series gave me the confidence to go beyond my tentative landscape photos of the local Waitpinga bush on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia by continuing to walk along his pathway and continue with my initial photographs through becoming attached to this place by being at home in the bush. I came to understand that the history of both the Black Range and the Waitpinga bush as a place or topos meant that they are both bounded and open, both singular and plural. I realized that the question of place they raise is also a question of time or history, which can be understood as a history of these specific places coming into being and undergoing change.
A key issue in contemporary photography is how can photography address climate change, given the convincing account by climate science with respect to the geological epoch of the Anthropocene. We now live in a world where non-human entries are more vast and powerful than we are: our reality is caught up in them, and they could well dislodge us from our commanding position over nature. This points towards a dark ecology that assumes an awareness of our ecological dependency, coupled with our realisation of how we have been re-shaping and damaging the planet’s ecological systems. If we are to really think the interconnectedness of all forms of life and all things, then hesitation, uncertainty, irony, and thoughtfulness need to be put back into ecological thinking.
If photography is to be relevant to this present, then what could an eco-orientated photography say? What kind of story could it visually narrate? Could such a photography create a cultural space within which very different kinds of knowledge and practice meet? Though there is no blueprint, such a photography would need to be different to, and critical of, the photographic visions of settler colonial landscapes of John Watt Beattie and Nicholas Caire as these were premised on the emptiness, pristine wilderness and pastoral utopias . It would also need to critically assess the aesthetic concepts established during the Romantic era, which framed the golden age of landscape painting and the visual arts in the nineteenth century.
These aesthetic concepts divided the natural world into the 3 categories of the pastoral, the picturesque, and the sublime. If the first two historically represented nature as a comforting source of physical and spiritual sustenance, the sublime referred to the thrill and danger of confronting untamed nature and its overwhelming forces, such as thunderstorms, alps, deep chasms, wild rivers and stormy seas.
Whilst both the pastoral and picturesque reference human kind’s ability to control the natural world, pastoral landscapes historically celebrated the dominion of humankind over nature. If the roots of the pastoral lie in a form of poetry that celebrates the pleasures and songs of the herdsmen, then this steadily expanded to a visual representation of rural nature that exhibits the ideas and sentiments of those to whom the country affords pleasures and employment. The scenes, which are usually peaceful, historically depicted ripe harvests, lovely gardens, manicured lawns with broad vistas and fattened livestock, were in contrast to the views of the court or the city. John Constable’s landscape paintings of the English countryside are a classic example.
In colonial Australia the settlers developed and tried to tame nature so that the land yielded the necessities the colonialists needed to live, as well as beauty and safety. If Joseph Lycett established the pastoral landscape tradition in Australia, then Arthur Streeton’s ‘The purple noon’s transparent might’ is an iconic example of the representation of the Australian pastoral landscape. In this tradition of the Australian idealisation of settler landscapes — Australia as a Promised Land — Europeans are seen to be in harmony with a fertile land; a land which has been ordered and produced by them, and in which they are able to experience leisure and pleasure. The Heidelberg School’s celebration of colour and light is a popular example of this tradition.
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:
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.
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