This was made whilst I was on a photocamp at Morgan in South Australia's Riverland in November. The camp was for the Mallee Routes project and I was there with Gilbert Roe, a fellow collaborator on the project.
This picture was made during a photo session at Magpie Springs:
It is a pile of burnt logs from a bush fire.
This is a photo of a section of a tin wall in Myers Lane in Adelaide's CBD.
This wall was just opposite where I used to live in the city, which was in the process of change during the shift from an industrial to a postindustrial or information capitalism. Our image culture changes into a digital culture with this shift. This was a time of rapid technological change, due to the emergence of digital technologies, such as the computer, the mobile phone, the internet as a information superhighway, computer generated imagery, video surveillance in the shopping mall and the high tech Desert Storm of the Gulf War.
This is a photography of appearances, of the look of things, the ephemeral, the particular. It is an older way of seeing that is being dislodged by the post-photographic tendency in a digital culture to devalue and deny the representation of appearances and sight in favour of the emancipation of the image from its empirical moorings.
This is the introduction to the book.
The impact of digital technology on photography was initially seen in the 1990s as a threat to, and a undermining of, the practical tradition of visual representation of the photographic. This was usually expressed in terms of the death of photography, the loss of the real, and the emergence of the post-photographic age.
This kind of understanding signified both a sense of the displacement of photographic practice by the use of digital technology and a sense of epochal change in our visual culture. Digital imagery meant new ways of seeing based on a freedom from the inherent constraints of automatism and realism that tied the analogue photographer to being a mere recorder of reality--a mirror held up to the world. The duality between the photography and the digital image is stark and it is understood in terms of technological means of production.
There is a view that film photography after digitalisation provides a way to create poetry because the convenience of digitalization also tidies things up, correcting mistakes and eliminating chance. If this analogue media of contemporary art involves a backward glance to what has been, as we become ever more immersed in digital media, it also keeps photography open to chance.
You don't know what you are going to get with film, even when the photo has been carefully scoped and theme of the shoot carefully selected.
A Mallee landscape near Mantung, in South Australia.
Another attempt at a still life in one of the open air studios:
This studio was located just west of Depps Beach, which borders Victor Harbor and Waitpinga.
A reworking of an earlier post so that it becomes more of an abstraction.
I am surprised that I didn't see this when I made the photograph whilst walking around Hobart, Tasmania. I was making a lot of photographic abstractions around 2012.
Made on a poodlewalk along the Heysen Trail in Waitpinga, South Australia, in 2016
I went back in the autumn of 2017 to rephotograph with bigger cameras, but the bark had fallen to the ground from the winter storms.
The talk circa 2011 is that with the analogue-to-digital shift to the last decade, film has died and digital photography opens up new horizons. The symbolic events are the end of Kodachrome in 2010 and the blowing up of the Kodak film plants in both Rochester and Chalon-sur-Saône.
Whilst film aficionados lament a disappearing past, digital devotees are looking forward to endless expansion based on recycle, clip and cut, remix and upload.The argument is that it took the death of film to fully liberate the medium from the paradigms of painting.
This image was made with an old Leica film camera whilst I was staying in Tunbridge in the Tasmania Midlands in 2017.
I had just come back from spending several days photographing in Queenstown whilst Suzanne and her friend were walking in the Walls of Jerusalem National Park. We were staying at Tunbridge for a couple of days before we wen exploring the Tasman Peninsula.