Another 8×10 road trip will be taking place next week. This time it is a road trip through the Mallee in South Australia and Victoria in order to photograph the silos along the Mallee Highway. I will be camping at Ouyen in Victoria with Gilbert Roe. Let’s hop the weather has cooled down by then.
I scoped this last year during the spring when I was on my Canberra trip with both the digital Sony NEX-7 and the old Rolleiflex SL66. I will be using an 8×10 camera ( for black and white) and a 5×7 camera ( for colour). The project works in the tradition of the aesthetic as a realm of experience being separate from the instrumental thinking of both daily life and the market’s economic reason.Though the approach is historical in orientation it will be quite different to the road trips of David Marks between 2001-6 where he used Diana and Polaroid cameras.
I cannot remember the individual silos in the small towns.For instance I cannot recall which town on the Mallee Highway this particular silo is in that I made with the Rolleiflex SL66. Maybe it was around Walpeup or Underbool in Victoria:
silo+house, Mallee Highway
I never took any notes on the trip. I was just scoping the various silos to see if this economic architecture could constitute a conceptual type photography project—-something along the lines of ’13 silos on the Mallee Highway’. It is conceptual in the sense that I first came up with the title, then proceeded to photograph the subject on one of my road trips from Adelaide (my hometown) to Tooleybuc just south of the River Murray . The work of art is to be the book itself, simply but carefully designed. Continue Reading…
