Browsing Tag

nature

Japan, landscape, people, street

The figure of the tourist

January 19, 2025

The cultural frame I had of Japan when I visited as a tourist was that of 1990s Japan layered over a vague history of 1960s street photography. In the Australian imagination Tokyo was a place of sophistication and wealth, good taste and cultural authenticity, a postmodern culture, and a reputation for deferential hospitality. A fantasy land of good old fashioned Orientalism.

I was aware that Japan’s economy had never regained the growth of the pre-l980s boom years, and that after the asset bubble burst in the 1980s, there was the three “lost decades”. The images of Japan that spring to mind are of the bustling, neon-splashed streets of Tokyo and Osaka, towering walls of steel and glass, teeming pedestrians on the footpath along with green mountains and cherry blossoms and Zen temples and tea houses. Oh, and the Japan of Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Sony A7 R111
Nachi Waterfall

I didn’t know about Japan’s image factory: the post-1995 otaku culture and the gaming subculture of the 1990s. I wasn’t aware of Japan’s embrace of peak tourism with the low yen; an emerging unease amongst Japanese of the over- tourism with their rolling suitcases (36 million in 2024); the demographic collapse, the disappearing, somewhat unsustainable, countryside villages, traditionalism as a culture industry, the izakaya bars, and the multitude of the guest workers looking after the tourists. Japan grows poorer and more existentially uneasy whilst China is the new hegemon.

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nature, roadside, trees

Roadside #2: unconcelament

October 28, 2024

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.

Rolleiflex SL66
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.

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Japan, urban, walking

The Basho walk: starting

June 23, 2024

In late 2023 Suzanne and I spent 3-4 weeks in Japan during their autumn. Autumn is an inbetween time: summer is over and winter near. We had time in Tokyo, Morioka and Osaka as well as doing 2 walks: a Basho walk from Sendai to Yamadera and the Kumano Kodo pilgrim walk from Yuasa to Shingu. The Bashō walking tour,which started in Sendai, took place after we’d spent 5 days in Shinjuku, Tokyo and 3 days in Morioka.

The Bashō walking tour followed part of Matsuo Bashō’s third major journey to the north of Honshu. He sold his house in Fukagawa, Edo (now Tokyo) before he started travelling in 1689 with Kawai Sora, his travel companion for the most part, who also wrote a diary. Bashō and Sora travelled on foot about ten miles a day for about 5 months. The journey was approximately 720 miles and there were some 40 stations and stops on the journey through northern and central Honshu. Bashō returned to Edo in the winter of 1681 to a new house that was built for him. His travel sketch of that journey, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is a blend of prose and haiku.

Rolleiflex SL66
Sendai, Honshu

Bashō and Sora entered the Tōhoku region of northern Honshu after walking 200 miles and they entered the city of Sendai in May 1689. This was Station 18. They stayed for several days before going to the scenic pine covered Matsushima islands via the town of Shiogama. Whilst in Sendai they were taken on a sightseeing tour of the area by a wood block artist and owner of a bookstore whom Basho identifies as Kaemon.Whereas Basho saw fields of bush clover, hills covered in blooming white rhododendrons, and dark pine woods I saw a large industrial city, the biggest in the Tōhoku region.

It was an overnight stay in Sendai as we arrived in the late afternoon and left the following morning for Matsushima. As my time for any exploratory urban photography was in the late afternoon before the tour briefing and dinner and early in the morning before breakfast I was limited to walking around the area near the hotel.

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film, light, water

light

March 15, 2024

The image below is a continuation of the little experiment that I’d started  a couple of years ago to photograph light itself. At this stage I am not sure whether the experiment will evolve into a series.

This is early morning light over the sea at Encounter Bay looking to the right of  Wright Island across to the Coorong. It  is from the winter of 2022, and it  was  made whilst I  was  walking along Jetty Rd from  Rosetta Head in Victor Harbor on a poodlewalk with Kayla.  The image  was made with Franke & Heidecke’s archaic and retro  Rolleiflex TLR camera.

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critical writing, large format, trees

Photography and the anti-pastoral: part 1

September 21, 2023

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.

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