Browsing Tag

Victoria

coastal, fire, Victoria

walking/photography

April 10, 2022

Whilst walking for 7 days on the various trails at Wilsons Promontory National Park in Victoria with the Retire Active SA Bushwalkers group I tried to link walking with photography. It had been 20 years since this group had been to Wilsons Promontory, so it was a big occasion for them. About 65-70 people went and they walked in the 4 different grades of walking in terms distance and difficulty. I was in the C grade to allow myself time to do photography whilst bush walking.

It had been about 10 years since I’d been to Wilsons Promontory and I didn’t remember that much as I was a day tourist then, rather than a bushwalker /photographer We stayed in a farm cottage just outside the park’s entrance and made day trips into the park. I remember going to Tidal River and Squeaky Beach and photographing the rocks along the side of the road up to Mt Oberon.

Squeaky Beach carpark

The inspiration is Eleanor Dark’s bushwalking in the Blue Mountains as well as Manning Clark walking almost every line in his A History of Australia. So is the historian Tom Griffiths, a keen bush walker, who like Clark, is keenly aware that the past is alive and shifting in the present. Their quest for historical understanding helps to inform a contemporary photography.

It is difficult to successfully combine walking and photography with a bushwalking group because their emphasis is on walking, rather than a creative walking art project. So the photography is necessarily limited to digital snaps whilst walking or making photos (digital and film) before and after the daily walks. My photographic emphasis was on the latter.

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landscape, trees

landscape Now

June 9, 2021

The history of the representations of landscape in Australia was complex, if not contradictory, given that landscape is a contested term, meaning very different things to different people. The modernists, for instance, held that landscape was an anachronistic genre, part of a old, privileged gum tree tradition ‘overthrown’ by Modernism. Landscape as a term should be abandoned it was held. Currently, landscape is often viewed in the art institution to be of little or no relevance in our overwhelmingly urban, more or less progressive, global culture.

On the other hand, the view that the visual representations of landscape (the bush) were deemed to be old fashioned and irrelevant only lasted until various modernists — such as Nolan, Boyd, Williams — turned to representing the landscape after stepping outside the capital cities into what they called the Outback or the dead centre. Then the visual representations of landscape became okay and their representations were not ideological ie., it was not embedded in ideology. Landscape is the framed view whose paradox islandscape is that it is both what is other to the human subject: land, place, nature; and yet, it is also the space for projection, and can become, therefore, a sublimated self-portrait or a field of dreams.  

on location: Otway National Park, Victoria

This contradictory history of modernism has dissolved in three ways. Firstly, is the idea of topographics as a ‘man-altered landscape’ that emerged after the influential New Topographics exhibition in 1975 at George Eastman House. Secondly,  we can understand the representation of ‘landscape’ as the means by which artists engage with issues of place, with questions about our location in the world – a location which is always, as Merleau-Ponty made clear, originally grounded in our immediate bodily location. 

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archives, landscape, Victoria

Otways: Archival

March 30, 2021

I have arranged to go on a large format field trip with the Melbourne based Friends of Photography Group (FOPG) in the Great Otway National Park in and around Lorne. Whilst preparing for this field trip by looking at Google maps I remembered that I had photographed in the western edge of the Otway National Park in 2016. This was on an earlier roadtrip that included Canberra, Ballarat and Melbourne.

farm, Johanna

We were on the return leg of the roadtrip and stayed a couple of nights with the standard poodles at some upmarket seaside cottages near Johanna Beach that overlooked a farm. It was a short walk through the campsite and the sand dunes to the surfing beach, and a small drive across the Great Ocean Road to the edge of the forest along the Old Ocean Rd.

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large format, trees, Victoria

Feature: large format #1

March 10, 2021

I have just spent a lot of money on buying film from B+H in New York. It arrived within a week of ordering, which rather surprised me. I thought that it would take at least twice as long with the international border restrictions due to the Covid -19 pandemic. However, film photography, and especially large format colour photography, is becoming increasingly expensive. The costs, such as the ever rising price of film, the various customs/transport/GST charges, and the post processing at a commercial lab such as Atkins in Adelaide, certainly add up over a year. The cost is probably around, or even over, $A2000 a year.

So I have to do something with the large format images, since many of those that are not part of an exhibition, just sit on my computer’s hard drive, and never see the light of the day. I did think of starting a large format blog to justify the expense, time and difficulty in using large format cameras. As I have far too many blogs–and there is the wonderful Australian based view camera blog run by David Tatnall — I have decided to post some of the large format images here on a regular basis.

I plan to post them every now and again and to do so as a feature of the blog. This initial post reaches back into the archives circa 2015. I am not sure if I ever posted these images before. I didn’t really know what to do with them. For some reason I haven’t posted them on my low profile tree or Rhizomes blog.

Ballan Forest, Victoria, Australia, 2015

The picture above was made with a 5×4 Linhof Technika IV several years ago. I was staying at Creswick in Victoria to check out the Ballarat International Foto Biennale in 2015. Though I don’t remember much about the various exhibitions in the biennale, I do remember photographing in the Ballan eucalyptus forest. Or maybe it was the Bungal State Forest near Ballan.

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nature, rocks, Victoria

Mt Arapiles: 2 photos

January 16, 2020

In this post I mentioned my weekend trip to Mt Arapiles in Victoria with the Melbourne-based Friends of Photography Group (FoPG) in September 2019. Since then I have developed and scanned the 5×4 colour negatives and post-processed them in Lightroom. I have yet to develop and scan the black and white photos that I made on the trip. The Adelaide Art Photographers 1970-2000 book and the Mallee Routes exhibition have taken up all my time.

One of the areas that I did explore that weekend was Mitre Rock, which is an isolated outcrop to the north of Mt Arapiles that looks out onto farmland:

Mitre Rock, Mt Arapiles, Victoria

Though I walked around Mitre Rock and went back several times I only made a couple of photos of this western wall of the outcrop. I didn’t make many 5×4 photos that weekend. I was finding my feet, as it were, as I didn’t know the area at all and I was more focused on continuing on to Murtoa in the Wimmera to make 5×4 photos for the Mallee Routes exhibition in December.

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