nature – Page 4 – Thought Factory

a road trip with an 8×10

March 29, 2016

I am planning a large-format road trip to the Coorong where I will work with the 8×10 Cambo monorail, black and white film, and one 300mm normal lens. I will also have a 5×4 field camera with me to use with colour film and for when I am walking through the wetlands. The photo trip is to build material for the second part of the Edgelands project.

I will attend a workshop at Meningie run by the Centre for Culture, Land and Sea on the ecological state of the River Murray and Coorong on Sunday 3rd April. I will then drive to, and base myself at Salt Greek for 3 days. The work from this roadtrip will be part of a group exhibition at the South Coast Regional Arts Centre (in the historic Old Goolwa Police Station building). The exhibition is a part of the Alexandrina Council’s 2016 ‘Just Add Water’ program.

melaleuca, Coorong

Before you think a road trip with an 8×10 monorail is crazy, here is a precedent from the 1980s: then Doug Spowart (using a Sinar P 8×10) and Maris Rusis (he was Queensland’s only committed 10×8 image-making practitioner at the time) did a road trip from Brisbane to Canberra, Kosciuszko and Suggan Buggan in the late 1980’s with 8×10 monorails. Continue Reading…

history, landscape, nature, topographics

Land Dialogues

March 23, 2016

There is a forthcoming conference on Land Dialogues at the Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, NSW, Australia. It is an interdisciplinary approach to place/space and human/non-human convergence discourses. The conference blurb says that this involves the following themes:

(1) Analysis or application of existing or emergent dialogues with land in indigenous, pre-colonial, post-colonial and anti-colonial contexts.(2) Explorations of the limits (or perceived limits) of sustainment principles, sustainabilities, ecologies and agriculture.(3) New/Old Frontiers, Land and the Digital and explorations of, or reflections on potentials for new topographies including data visualisations in relationship to land. (4) Experimental or experiential works or non-standard items including exhibition or performance towards dialogue with land.

Theme (4) includes a photographic exhibition that is curated by James Farley entitled Land Dialogues – Contemporary Australian Photography (in Dialogues with Land). The Photographers involved include Christine McFetridge, Kate Robertson, Renata Buziak, James Farely, Chris Orchard, Jacob Raupach, Felix Wilson, Carolyn Young and Amy Findlay. However, it is unclear what kind of dialogue with the land these photographers are engaged in since there is no curatorial statement online apart from the general statement that photographers involved are exploring and reevaluating how the Australian community identifies, represents and values the spaces that we create and occupy. Surprisingly, there no abstracts of the conference papers online.

Currently we have a vacuum about the nature of dialogues with nature in contemporary photography within the gallery system that was once premised on the modernist divide of nature and culture as mutually exclusive. Nature was landscape rather than country, and nature existed in a repressed state in the galleries through the 1980s and early 1990s. So what kind of dialogues with nature are happening in the second decade of the 21st century, given that agricultural industrialisation, which was an early cornerstone of Australian modernity, has left us with parched catchment areas, salt encrusted soil and degraded rivers?

My own work in the Edgelands project —here and here —-can be considered to be a dialogue with the land as opposed to country. This image of the Murrumbidgee River near Hay is an example:

Murrumbidgee River

The Murrumbidgee River runs through Wagga Wagga and it is the second largest source of water flows into the Murray-Darling system. The 1,600 km long river is ranked as one of the two least ecologically healthy of 23 tributary rivers in the Basin. Lake Burley Griffin, which is a part of the upper Murrumbidgee, is pretty much a fetid carp pond. By the mid 1970s, almost all of the water in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area had been allocated to irrigators, and today we are seeing an example of river system collapse with the signs of an ecological disaster are all too clear.

colour, critical writing, digital image, landscape, nature

on location: Salt Creek in the Coorong

February 24, 2016

The Coorong in South Australia is basically a string of saltwater lagoons sheltered from the Southern Ocean by the sand dunes of the Younghusband Peninsula. It is still largely seen as a pristine wilderness rather than an edge land. Nature from this perspective is a by-word for “wilderness areas”.

The Coorong is identified as a National Park, which is then reduced to a pristine wilderness that is a sanctuary for many species of birds, animals and fish. It is held to be a pristine wilderness (an elsewhere beyond human culture and society), despite the existence of walking trails; the waters of the Coorong being a popular venue for recreational and commercial fishers; and it being a remote space where we go to in our SUV’s on weekends and public holidays. The idea of wilderness area is a social/political construction as not all parts of the Coorong are a national park or a pristine wilderness.

The concept of nature underpinning the idea of the Coorong as a pristine wilderness means that it is seen as a self-contained, harmonious set of internal self-regulating relations that always return to harmony and balance so long as they aren’t perturbed by humankind. Because nature is seen as harmoniously self-regulating, any technological intervention in nature is seen as inviting harm, disaster and catastrophe.

This conception of nature as a pristine wilderness goes back to the Romantics, who constructed nature as offering a respite from the transgressions of so-called civilised European society then undergoing the initial phases of capitalist industrialisation. Nature is seen as sacrosanct and is venerated. Nature as “over there,” somehow separate from our daily lives, is then set on a pedestal.

at the salt site

The next step is to argue that the ultimate cause of our ecological problems is modern technology, Cartesian subjectivity, within which we are abstract beings somehow outside nature, who can manipulate nature, dominate nature. Nature is an object of our manipulation and exploitation. Modernity is based on a hard and fast distinction between Nature and Culture, where the two domains are to be thought as entirely separate and distinct. Continue Reading…

coastal, digital, landscape

Edgelands: the Coorong

February 20, 2016

On the way back from Melbourne I spent a couple of days exploring the Coorong around Salt Creek to scope for the second part of the Edgelands project. Edgelands are often seen as dead zones or tracts of land with confused and unassigned values on the urban fringe. Our cities, for instance, have many inactive patches of land that fall out of favor with humans for many reasons. These humdrum urban corridors or borderlands are usually seen as distinctively non-photogenic commonplace spaces.

However, there are spaces that are outside the urban fringe between the carefully defined spaces of farmland and national parks that are also edgelands which have a minimal human engagement. In South Australia these can be found around the Coorong. Most people visiting the Coorong either camp in the Pink Gum wood land near Salt Creek in the national park, or they cross the waters of the Coorong at 42 mile or Tea Tree Crossing off the loop road to the sand dunes for their wilderness camping or to go fishing along the shore of the ocean beach. Parts of the Ngrugie Ngoppup Walk near Salt Creek, for instance, goes through a space that is not obviously occupied and not clearly marked by traditional boundaries of farm and national park.

How then, to photograph this landscape?

I wanted to avoid the dramatic morning and evening light favoured by an environmental Romanticism that places the emphasis on both natural beauty and this remote landscape being a pristine natural world that is a refuge from the ravages of an industrial capitalism fuelled by coal, oil and gas. This has resulted in a substantial level of landscape change —in both its nature and magnitude. The Coorong is a melancholy landscape.

Coorong, midday

It is a necessary to walk these spaces to discover them, as they are not obvious from the road or through a car windscreen the highway. Ari and I walked part of this space in the middle of the day, so that I could take some snaps with a digital camera to study on the studio’s computer screen when I returned to Encounter Bay. This is a landscape that evokes feelings of uncanny alienation and a mood of dark depression. Continue Reading…

colour, landscape, nature

Fleurieuscapes: the poetics of place

February 17, 2016

Whilst I was walking and photographing in the Otway forest during my Melbourne trip I realised that my relationship with the southern Fleurieu Peninsula had changed from visiting to dwelling. I now live in on the coast and belong to this place. That meant my photography of the region had become place based, as it was premised on both taking a walk in the landscape rather than rushing to explore or discover and dwelling in a place.This photography is a recovery of a sense of our embeddedness of place.

Dwelling in a place implies a greater environmental awareness and sensitivity and is usually contrasted with the more instrumental domination of the landscape that is premised on power, control and exploitation. Dwelling implies a capacity to observe, underestand, describe and being attentive to, and caring for, the natural environment of the place where one is living.

3 gums, pm

There is a tradition of representing the Australian landscape as hostile to its human inhabitants; a tradition that reaches back to the colonist representation of the harshness of the Australian landscape nature. The colonists saw Australia as a land of stance animals and bizarre plants, a land worn out though it were a land left behind by time, as an alien, barren hostile land that had been deserted by God. Their response to the landscape was to trash it in order to dominate it. Continue Reading…

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