Our language is never simply just ours.
For something singular to emerge, it can only emerge by passing through what one inherits. As photographers, we borrow, cite, and improvise on the language of the previous photographers. Photography itself is a mode of citation and we try to make a difference whilst using a visual language that does not simply belong to us. It simultaneously reproduces and alters what it cites.
Photography is well known for its capacity to freeze time as well as movement. The word snapshot suggests that a tiny slice of time is recorded for posterity. The snapshot takes an instant out of time, and by holding time still it offers us an opportunity to see what once was. The image is understood as historical in that history happens when something becomes present in passing away.
The snapshot gives us a glimpse of the history that we have lived and it helps us to remember that history and to see how things have changed. Snapshots of history represent the the survival of the traces of what is past and they depend on our ability to interpret these traces as traces embedded in a particular place and our forgotten memories.
The return to the past--to a historical artistic culture of the 20th century -- is a precarious one: in seeking stimulation from the past we are in danger of being overwhelmed by it, and that we become epigones—a copy or a replica---and caught up in nostalgia. We can also make creative use of history by fashioning new metaphors/images to fashion a provisional visual vocabulary for the present.
What immediately stands out in looking back on this journey into a photographic/visual culture is how the digital disruption has changed the way we look at images. They have become disposable, easy to make, and there has been an explosion of images on the internet. With the digital camera photography has been thrust into our visual culture at an impossible to keep up with. Though film based or analogue photography--- in its different forms-- belongs to a different era it survives as a niche practice and a form of resistance to a mass digital culture.
What then stands out is the way that artists are reprogramming existing work, inhabiting historical styles, making use of images, using society as a catalog of forms and investing in fashion and media. These practices have in common the recourse to already produced forms. They testify to a willingness to inscribe the work of art within a network of signs and significations, instead of considering it an autonomous or original form. The already existing materials is the data to build their practice on and so we have a new culture of reusing the existing.
One characteristic of the art institution in Adelaide is the deficiency or the lack of an artistic apparatus. There is a marked paucity of spaces to discuss, study, produce, display, and commercialise art in areas far away from consolidated art centres. It has meant that artists photographers and art professionals who decide to stay in their local area need to find creative solutions to overcome the precariousness of their institutional field—by organising artist-run spaces, exhibitions, magazines, and communities.
The turn to the internet (social media and the blogosphere) meant departing from the art institution's established art centres and its canonical rules, especially since these marginal spaces sometimes do not conform to (or are not interested in) the rules and narratives instituted by canonical art history. However, many fragmentary online spaces have a short-lived existence, and the instability of these art practices reflects the conditions of “liquid modernity”.
Contrary to the view that Australian national culture has disappeared as a side-effect of globalisation a common idea of Australia retains its power. This is the view of national identity in that Australians being-in-the-world see the world as threatening and irrational, interpersonal relations as fraught with danger, individuals are the passive victims of their social and institutional environments and that we trapped in the middle of a beautiful but alien wilderness, full of strange noises and impervious to penetration, conquering or settlement.
It is a garrison or fortress mentality with its strong sense of isolation, impotence and claustrophobia. Australians maintain a fundamental distinction between “society” and “wilderness”--- the vast alien desert or scary outback. We sit huddled together on the coast with a negative sense of the frontier compelled to construct real and symbolic buffers against the terror evoked by an unconquered nature. Closed rather than open.
It took a long time to deconstruct the positivist conception of objectivity and truth that had underpinned the street or documentary photography of the 20th century and to accept that photography is an interpretation of the present produced from a particular perspective of diverse, fluid subjects.
Consequently, there are many kinds of photographies and our understanding of the past today are the pictures, images, and memories scattered throughout the city like a collection of snapshots strewn upon its floor, some prominently displayed, some a little obscured, others well buried. All can be picked up and re-circulated to differing ends. Indeed, somewhat akin to the “cut and paste” of contemporary digital culture that enables various elements to be easily combined, manipulated, and, of course, disposed.
The use of the Leica has traditionally been associated with photojournalism, street photography and photographic realism. Realism is usually interpreted in terms of the positivist understanding of knowledge as an edifice based on fact and observation, the objectivity claimed by foundational epistemology, and the universality of the view from nowhere or the God's eye view.
The philosophical underpinnings of this positivism can be found in photography's indexical relation, which is taken to distinguish photography from other forms of picture making. The inference drawn is that an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of the human being. Consequently, images made by strictly photographic means are solely causal traces of the objects responsible for them.
Snapshot photography is usually defined as having the following characteristics. They must be taken by a snapshot camera Kodak to Holga); snapshot formats are limited in number and small in size; snapshots are generally anonymous; snapshots tend not to be (pictorially self-conscious; snapshots are made to memorialize their subjects; snapshots have an arbitrariness in that unintended effects, large or small, are the rule. They are taken by amateurs who more or less snapped the shutters of their cameras.
Art Galleries and museums have started constructing snapshots as belonging to the folk or popular art tradition. The folk or popular art tradition is often interpreted as vernacular photography implying naïve or primitive art. This is then distinguished from art photographers from Jacques-Henri Lartigue to Nan Goldin have self-consciously borrowed the snapshot look as a stylistic manner.
In contemporary art photography the current use of the snapshot's pictorial style is not simply a return to the anti-aesthetic informality of Conceptual art. This is because the boundaries between professional artist, occasional artist, and non-artist have been perceived to have been eroded in the 1990s. This has created an elision between “advanced aesthetics” and the aesthetics of the photographic amateur, and concomitantly a blurring between the “good photograph” (the result of extensive labor and post processing ) and the would-be “bad photograph” (the instantaneous photograph taken as a private love-token or momento mori).
The current digital transformations, from photography’s unprecedented proliferation to its new means of circulation and display through social networking sites has reinforced two ideas at the heart of contemporary hipster snapshot culture: the romantic notion of the “amateur” photographer as a reflexive artist-in-waiting and some notion of mass cultural democracy in popular photographic practice associated with families and friendships.
The 1990s and 2000s are routinely identified as an era of deregulation, globalisation and neoliberalism as successive Australian governments have progressively "open up" the Australian economy to international competition, ending industry assistance, eliminating remaining tariffs and encouraging exports. The neo-liberal decade of economic growth due to the mining boom in Quarry Australia coupled to an authoritarian nationalism with its tacit white supremacism, hostility to cultural difference and xenophobia ended with the global financial crisis in 2008.
This process of internationalisation was seen as restricting Australia's national culture in that it was in danger of becoming an add on that existed the margins of the global art culture. Australia's visual culture was not seen as particularly distinctive in global art market terms. The national publishing industry was also impacted given the increasing dominance of multinational conglomerates and that meant fewer photo book opportunities for contemporary photography given the overseas publications being privileged over Australian ones. It also meant increasing exposure to the art movement flowing strongly through the old art centers of cities such as London, New York, and Paris; cities that for centuries, have been the engine rooms of modern art.