topographics – Page 6 – Thought Factory

colour, film, landscape, nature, topographics

On Ghostly nature

October 11, 2015

On Friday evening, after picking up my negatives from the Atkins Photo Lab for the Yellow Competition and those made on my recent trips to Canberra and Ballarat, I went to the opening of Ghostly Nature – part 2 at the Adelaide Town Hall. This exhibition, which is curated by Polly Jean Dance, as part of the Adelaide City Council’s innovative Emerging Curator Program, builds on her earlier Ghostly Nature Part One exhibition. Ghostly Nature – part 2 is an exploration of the dark and haunted side of our natural landscape that asserts itself in often mysterious, yet magical ways.

The image below is not from either of the Ghostly nature exhibitions at the Adelaide Town Hall. It is one of mine, and it is a picture of the Mt Lyell Open Cut mine in Queenstown, Tasmania, that is a part of the Edgelands body of work. I’ve introduced the image into this post to suggest that Polly Dance’s concept of the dark and haunted side of our natural landscape that asserts itself in often mysterious, yet magical ways refers to the sublime.

Mt Lyell Mine, Tasmania

It is good to see this reclaiming of the aesthetic concept of the sublime by Adelaide’s curators, since the sublime is predominantly an aesthetic category relating to nature and the concept has been used too little by Anglo-American philosophers who have largely forgotten this aesthetic category. A good case can be made that the neglect of the concept by Anglo-American aestheticians is unjustified: sublime responses, especially to natural environments, are still with us today, and may be even more frequent than in former times.

The Ghostly nature exhibition implies that its working understanding of the sublime goes beyond Edmund Burke’s concept of it in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) as a largely non-cognitive, affective arousal to one that understands the sublime response as including, in addition to this affective arousal, an intellectual play with ideas involving especially ideas regarding the place of human beings within the environment.
Continue Reading…

architecture, digital, history, topographics

history and architecture

September 24, 2015

It is not possible for me, living in South Australia as I do, to make large format photos of empty city streets as Thomas Struth did with his Dusseldorf and New York work; a body of work that explored the relationship between the unconscious and the past and sought to represent within the visible cityscape the hidden impulses and forces which have shaped the city. His compositions are simple and the photographs are neither staged nor digitally manipulated in post-production. Strong contrasts of light and shade are also avoided, Struth preferring the greyish, uninflected light of early morning.

Adelaide has limited architecture for this older tradition of urban architectural/street photography with its pictorial strategy of a central perspective and foregrounding background, that recalls the nineteenth-century Parisian vistas of French photographers Eugène Atget and Charles Marville. However, the social and historical institutional context of the architecture and the deserted town can be achieved with the country towns in the Victorian and South Australian Mallee since history and architecture are intertwined here:

Clarkes cornerstore, Cowangie

Many of the regional towns in the Victorian and South Australian Mallee have changing population compositions, with some localities experiencing decline. The small country towns in the Mallee, for instance are struggling to stay alive. Some are changing from being agricultural service towns to tourist towns, but for many of the smaller towns along the Mallee Highway there isn’t much tourism happening. People pretty much drive through these towns on their way to Canberra or Sydney.