Browsing Tag

colour

light, seascape, water

seascapes in dim light

December 10, 2024

My time walking in Japan last year and my subsequent reading of Japanese philosophy, including Junichiro Tanizaki’s ‘In Praise of Shadows’, has influenced my photography; in the sense of the pre-modern Japanese aesthetics is starting to shape, underpin and enframe my photographs of nature. Pre-modern as the bright, neon advertising signs of the Dotonbori canal’s nightscape in Osaka, or Ginza in Tokyo currently celebrate Japanese commercial post-modernity and its overwhelming consumerism.

Well known aesthetic categories include yūgen (the mysterious and the recessive), wabi (the stark and weathered), sabi (the rough and the austere) wabisabi (transience and imperfection), shibui (the simple and the humble), mono-no-aware (the pathos of things), Ma (negative space and time) and yohaku (empty space or what is left out). A category that is relevant to the seascapes is the indistinct (In’ei) which David Cooper observes can be found in Bashō, who writes of ‘a distant moon and a line of smoke’ glimpsed as he rides his horse, and of ‘nameless hills … decorated with thin films of morning mist’.

The category of the indistinct (In’ei) is starting to shape the form of the seascapes project:

Rolleiflex SL66
seascape, indistinct#1

The indistinct (In’ei) refers to the Japanese appreciation of mists, clouds, shadows and related phenomena – smoke, dusk, haze, and soft moonlight, for example — and more generally the occluded, blurred, rough or otherwise indistinct. This stands in contrast to order, clarity, sharpness, brightness, the radiance of the form of things. It is a dimmed down, shadowy world, one of dusk and moonlight, mist and clouds. Rather than the glare of bright daylight it is “muddy light”, “shadowy surface”, the subdued. It is walking through the the dark forest in the approach to the tea hut with its diffused lighting, or the dark path to the Shinto shrine, or the glint of gold lacquer on Buddha in a gloomy interior.

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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:

Rolleiflex SL66
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.

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colour, film, trees

a favourite tree

November 26, 2022

In the In Memoriam post on poodlewalks about having to put Kayla down due to her having cancer of the lymph nodes I mentioned that her love of being in, and walking in the local bushland, helped me to photograph the local Waitpinga bushland in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia. Being-in-this-world with her helped me shift away from viewing nature (the local bushland) as simply natural beauty; or its re-enchantment (mythos) on offer in today’s tourist industry.

Kayla helped my photography in the sense that being with her enabled me to see the detail in the bushland, see the transience of nature, discover particular settings and individual trees, and to become attached to the earth beneath us. By seeing the changes in the bush I started seeing nature as history. Natural history as perishable nature refers to more than our evolving conceptions of nature because nature itself changes: bark breaks and falls to the ground, trees are uprooted, plants die,  animals are killed, the earth’s water becomes polluted from the chemicals in the farm, and so on. Nature shares with human history a passing away or perishing. Walking each morning with Kayla helped me become aware of the subtle changes.

eucalupt, Waitpinga, 2022

This particular tree in the Waitpinga bushland is one that I photographed in different weather conditions with different cameras and films. On this occasion I used a 5×7 Cambo S3 monorail. It had been raining during the night. The colours were strange and intense. My coming back to photograph the tree’s frequently hanging conditions meant that it became my favourite tree in this bushland.

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abstraction, coastal, digital, exhibitions, rocks

photography and abstraction

December 21, 2018

I notice that  the Tate Modern has an exhibition entitled Shape of Light: 100 years of Photography and Abstract Art,   one whose art historical approach refers back to the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark photography exhibition, The Sense of Abstraction in 1960.   The Tate blurb states that this is the first major exhibition to explore the relationship between the photography and abstract art, spanning the century from the 1910s to the present day, and it includes some of the contemporary work by Antony Cairns, Maya Rochat and  Daisuke Yokota.

The Tate exhibition    basically re-inserts the history of photography into the well-writ narrative of art history to make a necessary point: – that photography merits serious consideration within the category of abstract art, and that the camera’s attraction to the shape of light rather than the shape of solid form as we perceive it, changed the way images of all kinds were composed. It also suggests that there has been  a fruitful dialogue between abstract painting (Miro, Riley, Braque, Mondrian, Pollock, Kandinsky)  and photography over the  last  hundred years.

This raises a question: has this kind of dialogue around abstraction come to an end in the 21st century rather than being  continued?

King’s Head abstraction

The curators place the 20th century’s avant-garde’s  photographic experimentations (ie., abstraction) in the context of wider developments in art, with examples of cubism, abstract expressionism, Bauhaus and op art providing benchmarks.  The  curatorial argument  is that abstract photography  has evolved in step with painting and that there is  a shared history.  The relationship between painting and photography has  been a symbiotic one, a close mutualist relationship that has benefited both art forms.

An alternative interpretation is that abstract photography  followed behind abstract painting,  in that abstract  painters influenced the way photographic artists understood image and  that the photos are the  monochrome equivalents of paintings.  This  interpretation  reinforces the culturally conservative position of the supremacy of painting. This conservative  interpretation  overlooks the way that both Rodchenko and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy challenged the supremacy of painting by refusing to see any medium as more important than another,  and by working in fields as diverse as film, graphic and theatre design, sculpture, painting and light shows. The common tendency in the Australian art institution is to adopt the conservative interpretation. Continue Reading…

coastal, colour, landscape, rocks, South Australia

homecoming

November 11, 2017

In  starting to  work on the Fleuriescapes project once again  I can now see that it is more about  place and  homecoming,  with the photographic style more in the form of poeticising.  The project  is about being at home in this particular place,  and it is about exploring what that means through poeticising what is familiar and taken-for granted  in our everyday,  pre-reflective life.

quartz+granite

After we left living in the CBD in Adelaide to shift down to Victor Harbor (ie., sea change) it slowly dawned on us that the southern Fleurieu Peninsula was our home  Adelaide is now where we go  to do business then leave to return home–it is a world of instrumental value and rushing about.  Though we were once comfortably at home in the city’s everydayness and its local neighbourhoods we no longer are at home where we used to live.

We often dip in and out of the consumer society of  the city; an urban life that is  based on unending economic growth  and gaining satisfaction from consumerism. We  no longer miss living in the urban  world of the city 0f Adelaide, with its coffee shops, entertainment, businesses, art galleries, film labs,  corporate universities,  people and politics.  Our experience of the city is now akin to one of homelessness–a passing away of belonging to a world based on unlimited economic growth.

Continue Reading…

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