The portfolios of the different projects are in the process of being built from the archives. Some of the projects have finished, some are ongoing, some are new.
Roadside
Roadside is a low key project that explores the roadside vegetation and the side of the road. Roadside has affinities with, and refers back to, Joyce Evans' black and white project entitled Edge of the Road, which was made in the 1980/1990s and exhibited in 2013 at the then Monash Gallery of Art in Melbourne.
Reconnections
Reconnections refers to my leaving Wellington in the early 1970s for Australia, briefly returning around 2013 after a 40 year absence, then returning regularly to visit. I moved away from New Zealand because I found it to be too closed, inward looking and oppressive. The long period of absence from New Zealand was marked by...
The Mallee
The Mallee was the Land of Promise in the early 20th Century, after the failure of pastoralism in the 19th century. Economic prosperity would result from the land clearance, agricultural development and the building of railway lines to transport the grain. Agricultural communities had been dissipated by two decades of economic depression, war and drought, and...
Adelaide street
These images of the streets of Adelaide were made with handheld cameras whilst I was on early morning or late afternoon poodle walks, mostly around the CBD. I was living in a townhouse in Sturt St in the CBD at the time and I could easily walk the CBD. This section of the Adelaide project explores the shift...
Selfies as portraits
Selfies is a whimsical project where the shadow of the photographer or that of the camera being used is a part of the picture. This highlights the way photography is constructed as well as its indexicality. The latter is seen as the ontological anchor of photography. The project rejects André Bazin's claim notes that, in...
silos
An architectural study of silos along the Mallee Highway, the Dukes Highway in South Australia and the Western Highway in Victoria's Wimmera Mallee. The project refers back to the extensive series of photographic images, or typologies, of industrial buildings and structures, by Bernd and Hilla Becher that were made in the 1950s and...
Alt Adelaide
Alt-Adelaide is the other or the underside side of Adelaide, the city of light and heritage architecture. These are the darker spaces in Adelaide, the enlightened city.
Adelaide’s Architecture
This project is a study of Adelaide's architecture. It is the perspective of someone who lived in the CBD for 10 years and walked the streets as a flaneur.
Australian Abstractions
This project reconnects with, and builds upon, the abstract photographic tradition in Australia, whose roots lie in the 1960s, but which appears to have been displaced and forgotten.
Adelaide a city of light
It's the light, not the churches, that is one of the notable characteristics of Adelaide. Adelaide is a city of light. The urban light in this modern city can be fleeting and momentary. It can be harsh. It can be gentle. It's here, then it's gone. This is about being in the moment, seeing the...
Dark landscapes
The dark landscape project works in the tradition that recognises the Gothic nature of the Australian landscape. The Australian Gothic is the focal point of all that is dark and menacing in Australian photography.
Edgelands 2
These edgelands are those liminal spaces that are passed through on the way somewhere else. They are ignored and untended places where a forgotten Australia exists.
Fleurieuscapes
The Fleurieuscapes project is the photography of place. It explores the regional land/urbanscape of the Fleurieu Peninsula in the contemporary world of a borderless, global capitalism with its society of the spectacle in which the commodity structure of a capitalism transforms things into ghostlike appearances of themselves. The Fleurieuscapes project is a representation of the sensuous...
Edgelands
The Edgelands project explores the interfacial interzone between the urban and the rural. The edgelands are the ever shiftinge space where city and countryside fray into one another. Though edgelands are often wastelands they are also spaces where people go to play and enjoy themselves. Edgelands are an interpretation of the Parisian Surrealist's idea of the terrain...
Australian topographics
Australian Topographics refers back to the 1975 New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, as well as to an understated Australian one. It is a modest reworking of both. Its focus is historical, a looking back on the recent past.
Tasmanian Elegies
This is a meditative project in the melancholic mode. This 'through the lens of loss' is a mourning for the destruction of the environment in Tasmania that was caused by resource extraction, such as mining and forestry. Historically the destruction caused by this form of economic development has resulted death and loss to both...
Natural history
The natural history project explores the idea of nature as history and history appearing as nature. The nature which is opposed to history is historical as it is characterized by growth and change and is subject to human intervention. On the other hand, human history and the capitalist economy has been mystified into nature, which...
Regional landscapes: South Australia
This modest project begins to explore the regional landscape of South Australia. Its concern is with natural beauty, which is traditionally contrasted with cities, industry and torn up industrial landscapes that are considered to be ugly.
Port Adelaide 1988-2011
The Port Adelaide project ran along side the Bowden one. I had a VW Kombi and a standard poodle called Fichte, and the Port was a good place for us to walk around in the open spaces adjacent to the Port River estuary. I was attracted by the empty heritage buildings in Port Adelaide, the...
Bowden 1980-90
In the 1980s I had a photographic studio in Bowden, an old inner city, industrial working class suburb in western Adelaide in South Australia adjacent to the Adelaide Parklands. I taught myself to use large format cameras and to represent a suburb starting to undergo change. I worked part time at Conroys Smallgoods factory in...
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[…] time has been spent working the website’s various galleries Two of the earlier portfolios are now pretty much in place—Bowden and Port Adelaide. They […]