The Mallee project starts

What emerged from the wreckage  was  the emergence of exhibitions  then photobooks   during the 1980s as the pre-eminent vehicle for a documentary photographer. These  forms  offered  an alternate model for formal experimentation,  narrative sequencing,  the rhetoric of the photo,  the poetics of form and public discourse than the mass media  magazines and newspapers.

The original template is  Walker Evans’s American Photographs, published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1938, then  Robert Frank’s  The Americans in 1958.  More recent examples include Michael Schmidt’s Waffenruhe, in 1987, Chris Killip’s, In Flagrante, 1988, and Paul Graham’s New Europe, 1993 which interrogated the gap between the reified public image of national identity, the  messy inheritance of history and the lived daily experience of ordinary lives in western liberal democracies.

What these text suggest is that,  since the older models of traditional documentary form were no longer suited to an digital cultural environment in which that genre was being debased and marginalised,  so  new formal inventions were necessary. One way to do this  is to avoid the stance of ‘meaning always arrived,’ guaranteed by the transparency of rhetoric and the finality of photographic truth. We need to make the shift to   a  more open ended approach through the sequencing of images to  allow a greater layering of meaning  thereby offering more interpretative possibilities of the work for the viewer.

Singer, Ouyen

This is the pathway opened by Walker Evans’ American Photographs:  a sophisticated layering  of meaning, both within individual images and more crucially across the progression of a photographic sequence, that enables his work to be more open, ambiguous, and thus demanding that the images be  read. This text  insists on the fragmentary qualities of photographic images, and it is this tendency, and the narrative strengths of which it is capable, that allow us to avoid the debilitated documentary practice of the untarnished reality of images.

Surprisingly,  people are supportive of, and interested in,   the Mallee project  when it’s mentioned  or when they come across a reference to it. The Mallee, it would seem, has a special place in people’s hearts in Australia. I don’t why. I thought that it –including the open Wimmera plains  and broad-acre and dryland farming —was a neglected and forgotten part of Australian history. It’s only an  irrigation system of farming based on cheap water and more intensive dairy  that resonates today.

The pioneer myth  says that native timbers were cleared to provide broad-acre crop land, settlers experimented with labour-saving machinery, they developed methods of managing their soils, and they grazed livestock on native pasture. This was a significant achievement in conquering an inhospitable nature.It ignores the land and environmental degradation that resulted.