Browsing Tag

coastal

landscape, nature, water

The ‘Our-Waters’ project

November 10, 2018

I have recently become involved in a new project entitled Our-Waters, which is  about the River Murray and the photographic archives of the  Godson Collection  held by the State Library of South Australia.  Some background to the project is here on my  Our Waters  Our Country blog,  which, for now,   is loosely associated with the  Our Waters project.

As it is  still early days in the project,  it has  no  public profile  (ie., there is no website) to inform people what is happening.    However, a   recent update on  the state of play of the  Our Waters project is on this blog post. This indicates that this photography is not what Rebecca Solnit calls eco-porn: photography  that  celebrate the  ‘untouched beauty’ of nature associated with  the nature tourism  and calendars that view our  land and rivers as a place of wildness and wilderness.

 

Lake Alexandrina, 2011

It is an opportune time to start such a project given the recent report on the ecological state of the Coorong by the Goyder Institute.   The  ecological condition of the Coorong has been steadily degrading since European “settlement” due to upstream water extractions, and  the Millennium Drought was a major disturbance causing a rapid decline in condition.   Whilst the relatively recent increase in natural and managed inflows to the Coorong  through the Murray-Darling Basin Plan have improved the ecological condition of the North Lagoon, the ecological condition of the South Lagoon  has  not recovered,  or it has continued to decline.  As Mary E. White wrote in her Running Down – Water in a Changing Land (Kangaroo Press, 2000):

The continuing saga of the extraction of massive amounts of water from inland rivers to satisfy the escalating demands of the irrigation industry is Australia’s most serious, and ultimately potentially most disastrous water-related issue. It is a battle between two essentially irreconcilable attitudes to land use.

To  speak plainly, the Murray-Darling Basin has been, and is being,  managed to  benefit the  irrigators.  Continue Reading…

black + white, coastal, Encounter Studio, studio

studio

December 30, 2017

Although I have a rudimentary studio set up at Encounter Studio (with  a 8×10 Sinar P,  a  table and window light)   most of the still life images that I do of the subject matter around the coastal neighbourhood at Victor Harbor are in open air settings. The method of working is simple. The locations and subject matter are selected whilst I am on the morning or evening poodle walks,  I take  some scoping photos with the digital camera (an old  Sony NEX-7)  and,  if they work,  I come back and reshoot them with a film camera.

This kind of  studio work is a break from my  topographic  approach to photography that I do for the Mallee Routes project.    This is  an early example, probably one of the first  images made in an open air,  coastal studio:

bottle + shells, Petrel Cove

The bottle  had been washed on  Dep’s Beach, which is west of Petrel Cove,  and I carried it back to Petrel Cove on the return leg of the poodlewalk. I  set it up amongst some rocks, and made some digital pictures.   I then hid the bottle  amongst some rocks so that people wouldn’t find it and the  high tide wouldn’t carry it back to sea.

Continue Reading…

coastal, colour, landscape, South Australia

aerial photography

November 28, 2017

As mentioned here and here  I had an opportunity to do some aerial photography in late November along the coast of  the southern Fleurieu Peninsula thanks to  Chris Dearden   and his  recreational Sonex motor-glider (a Xenos).   We flew from the privately owned Goolwa  airport  to   the mouth of the River Murray, then turned west and flew  to Newland Cliffs in Waitpinga,  then flew back to Goolwa.  This was the first time that I’d done any aerial photography outside of a few  snaps on various commercial flights.

I was stunned by the beauty of this part of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula  coastline from the air.  It sure looked very impressive.

Mouth of the River Murray

I just could not resist making a  photo of the mouth of the Murray River  with the two dredges working full time to  keep the mouth of the river  open. Water should be flowing through the mouth and into the Coorong, given the Murray-Darling Basin Plan and  the water buybacks to increase  the  environmental flows of the river and the dredges not needed.

What we have learned recently is that the  Murray-Darling Basin Authority is incompetent and that  the NSW state government and bureaucracy have been complicit in water theft and meter tampering. The Murray-Darling Basin Authority knew about the  theft of water for environmental flows  by  some irrigators for cotton growing in northern NSW and  it did nothing. Same for the Queensland  government. There is a long history of state governments in the Murray-Darling Basin  turning a blind eye to excessive water extraction  by irrigators.   Continue Reading…

abstraction, black + white, digital image, rocks

scoping in landscape photography: Fleurieuscapes

October 16, 2017

I really do struggle with  my landscape  photography in and  around Encounter Bay on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia,  even though I do a lot of scoping for it.   I struggle in the sense of having both a lots of doubts the value of this working and a lack of confidence in what I am doing —with both the coastal work and the roadside vegetation.   So I don’t get very far with working  the Fleurieuscapes project as I am not sure what I am doing with it.

I only have confidence in the abstraction side of this photographic project. The work process is now routine  and I am quite comfortable with it. I  make a digital study of the object,  sometimes convert the colour digital file to a  black and white one,   and  then  spend some time assessing  the image  for possibilities for  a 5×4 photo session.  Is it worth doing? If so, what is the best way to approach this?  This is an example of the work process –some granite rocks on the beach at Petrel Cove.

granite study for 5×4

I have sat on this image for a couple of months at least.  In fact I scoped it a year ago and I’d left it sitting on the computer. I re-scopped  it earlier this year when I was walking around exploring Petrel Cove whilst  on a poodlewalk.    I remembered that I had previously photographed this bit of rock and that I  wasn’t happy with what I had done, but I had thought that it had possibilities for a black and white 5×4 photoshoot  using the baby Sinar (F2). So  I re-scoped it.   Continue Reading…

abstraction, coastal, critical writing, digital, publishing

towards a photobook as photo-text

September 3, 2017

I have taken the plunge and started selecting the images  I have made whilst on my coastal poodlewalks   and putting them into a Lightroom  folder as the next step towards constructing a photobook.   I have been publishing some of these images on my  Littoral Zone weblog, which I had set up in order to help me figure out what I am doing with the photographs that have been made almost on a daily basis.   These are  simple, low key photographs of humble things and fleeting moments encountered  on my  various poodle walks.

Venus Bay, Eyre Peninsula, SA, 2013

Since the photos in the poodlewalks blog were images-in-text, the concept behind the  photobook is a visual  poetics,  or more accurately  a photo-poetics; one that explores word image (textual-pictorial)  relations.  The book as a photo-text   breaks with both the idea of the photographic image as a record of objects or events in the real world as in photojournalism’s narratives,    and the standard conception of  the  photobook being images with minimal or no  text. It is part of what   Liliane Louvel, the French theoriest, calls  an iconotext in which  text and image merge in a pluriform fusion.

Such an approach breaks with a formalist modernism, as that held   held  that the literary  and visual arts are substantially different and mutually exclusive; a view that reaches back to Lessing’s Laocoon  with its distinction between the literature  as a temporal art and the visual as a spatial art. With the  decay of formalist modernism these rigid boundaries were breached with many theorists and artists  positioning themselves against Lessing’s  rigid borders.  The mutual interdependence of images and words and the impure and mixed mediality of visual as well as verbal artifacts are  now widely accepted in our visual culture.  Photography-in-text is  a hybrid product that gives rise to a hybrid textual genre–an intermedial photo-text.   Continue Reading…

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