A log that had been washed up on the beach at the mouth of the Whakatane River at Whakatane in the Bay of Plenty in the North Island of New Zealand. The picture was made in the early morning light:
Cyclone Hola had gone through the upper part of the North Island bringing gales and rain in March 2018. The Whakatane River was still swollen when we were there, and it had dumped a lot of trees, branches and debris on the shore by the mouth of the river.
]]>This picture was made whilst I was on a photo trip to Morgan for the Mallee Routes project.
I was wandering around amongst some old machinery at Cadell in the early morning light. Cadell was like stepping back in time.
]]>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.
]]>Made whilst I was wandering around Hobart in 2012
This snap of a found still life was made along the coast between Petrel Cove and Kings Beach in Waitpinga whilst I was on an early morning poodlewalk:
I have been looking at an exhibition of the early 35mm work made by Joel Meyerowitz between 1963 and 1978. The exhibition is entitled "Joel Meyerowitz: Towards Colour 1962-1978", and it is at Beetles and Huxley, a photographic gallery in London. These Leica snapshots are from Meyerowitz's very early days shooting in black and white on the streets of New York to the year he published his first book, "Cape Light", the pictures of which were made with a large format camera.
Meyerowitz worked in advertising for four months of the year to support his family and devoted the rest of his time to photography. A number of the pictures in Mexico and Florida were made with a Guggenheim Scholarship to take pictures on the theme of 'leisure time'.
King William Street, Adelaide, South Australia.
This picture is from 2011. It was made for the Adelaide book project that I was starting to work on.
]]>In the nineteenth century the colonial narrative represented Central Australia negatively--it was a dangerous and hostile environment. It was the Australian Outback, and this was represented as being without economic potential a dead heart, arid and waterless, as a space of the 'other',
In the late 20th Australia represents Central Australia is seen positively. It becomes the Red Centre, a major desert tourist destination in the Northern Territory. The Red Centre in the tourist marketing brochures is the welcoming heart, the place of cultural significance, the site of the 'real' Australia, a site of unchanging beauty.
The tourist conception of the Red Centre primarily refers to Uluru, Kata Tjuta, Simpsons Gap, Glen Helen Gorge, Kings Canyon etc and the promotional images are those of a decorative pictoralism. The Tanami desert, which lies beyond the region of Australian Tourism's Red Centre, remains a space of the 'other': an empty land without a trace of culture.
The pictures made with the film Leica are snapshots and, and as such, they belong to the tradition of the snapshot image culture. Traditionally, snapshot photography is one in which the images are almost always produced for and circulated within, the private realm, and its meaning and significance are imbedded in individual and rarely rational affective responses.
The snapshot tradition has been interpreted as a form of vernacular photography, and this culture is usually interpreted as pictures made by everyday folk about their everyday life; or more specifically, "the unself-conscious efforts of common people . . . to create satisfying patterns in the realities of everyday life.
This results in a gap between the unruly vernacular culture and the modernist, hermeticizing discourse of the art institution, with its emphasis on autonomy, authorship, uniqueness and universality.
This vernacular culture insists on lived experience, or a rhetoric of authenticity, works within specific social and cultural conventions, and emphasises personal narrative. For most of us, snapshots mean something because they preserve a memory, capture a moment, or depict a friend, family member or loved one. -These are the same themes that Kodak promoted for decades. From a personal point of view the significance of snapshot aesthetics often revolves around what we see and feel when viewing snapshots, rather than what they mean to art historians, curators, and collectors.
]]>A picture of the past. A picture of life in a frontier mining world of Andamooka.
It's not much of a backyard or playground is it, at the foot of the opal mine tailings. My memory of Andamooka is that the dust from the mine tailings was everywhere, layered over everything. It was hot and the atmosphere was arid.
It's a remnant of the town's past --a different remnant to the raditional dugout style houses of old that was pictured in the previous post.
]]>This picture of an opal miners hut at Andamooka in South Australia, which is from my film archives --- an example of ordinariness or a deadpan aesthetic that was made whilst travelling on the margins of modernity.
Like the previous images the picture was made with a Leica M4-P, with a 50mm f.2 Summicron lens and Kodak 400ASA film. As previously mentioned in an earlier post I discovered a roll of film I'd exposed whilst I was visiting Andamooka circa 2004-5. My film work at the time--35mm and medium format--- was usually developed and scanned by a pro-lab, but for some reason this roll hadn't been scanned. This was several years prior to buying my first digital camera. I had no knowledge of digital cameras.
]]>From the film archives.
This is another image that I came across when I was going through my film archives. A public sculpture at Andamooka in South Australia. The picture was made with a Leica M4-P, a 50mm f.2 Summicron lens and Kodak 400ASA film:
As I mentioned in an earlier post I discovered a roll of film I'd exposed whilst I was visiting Andamooka circa 2004-5 My film work at the time--35mm and medium format--- was usually developed and scanned by a pro-lab, but for some reason this roll hadn't been scanned. This was several years prior to buying my first digital camera.
]]>From the archives.
A miner's grave at Andamooka in South Australia made with a Leica M4-P, a 50mm f.2 Summicron lens and Kodak 400ASA film:
I only came across this image when I was going through my film archives. I discovered a roll of film I'd exposed whilst I was visiting Andamooka circa 2004-5 My film work at the time--35mm and medium format--- was usually developed and scanned by a pro-lab, but for some reason this roll hadn't been scanned. This was several years prior to buying my first digital camera.
]]>The picture below is an archival image from the time when I'd just picked up film photography again after a 20 year break. The image was made whilst Suzanne and I were travelling in Tasmania on a holiday with our standards poodles (Agtet and Ari) in the 1st decade of the 21st century---it was in late 2006 judging from these posts on my old Junk for Code blog.
This was our first trip to Tasmania, and we were travelling down on the west coast of Tasmania at the time. There'd been a fire in the hills in the hills around Tullah, Lake Rosebery and the MacIntosh Dam. So I took some photos. I was rusty judging from the fact that most of the black and white negatives from this trip were badly underexposed.
The camera I was using then was my old Leica M4 with an old Summicron 50mm lens and Tri-X film. The picture was made before I'd shifted to using colour film and Mac computers. The film was developed and scanned by a pro lab and it was scanned as a jpeg--a low res scan.
I didn't know what a low res scan meant then. I knew nothing about the shift to digital that had been taking place in photography since the 1990s. I 'd just picked up from where I'd left photography 20 years earlier- I was more or less naively starting over again but without a wet darkroom.
]]>This picture of roadside vegetation was made whilst I was walking along a back country road in Waitpinga, on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. It was in the late summer in 2016 and I was on an early morning poodlewalk with the standard poodles.
I was forcing myself to take photos of trees and the agricultural landscape around me so as to keep my photographic eye hand in. This was the area/locality in which I now live, so how can I photograph it? I recall that I didn't have the confidence to set things up to do tripod based photography.
Though film has quickly gone poof (poor Kodak) as the medium of choice for photographers, I am part of that 'bridge generation' between film and digital. Digital, including rangefinder digital, is simply easier, faster and immediate since the camera is really a portable computer (with a sets of options,) and a sensor and lens. My technique is far slower and more measured with film.
My doubts about 35mm film photography are beginning to ease. I can see that there is still some life in 35mm film photography, in that it has a different quality to the digital version. But it is only for some subject matter, as I'm beginning to discover. Unfortunately, I cannot predict which one.
That filmic quality is hard to pinpoint, but it has something along the lines of providing a more emotional response to what is photographed, as distinct from a technically perfect image that can be quite bland. Digital images are unfilm like and so perfect that camera software manufacturers are now adding adding "grain" enhancement plugins.
]]>A rarely experienced moment during the summer months on the southern coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula near Waitpinga- dense sea fog:
It happened for a couple of days. It would roll in across the landscape in the late afternoon. Then it disappeared.
]]>An abstract image from when Suzanne and myself were in Wellington in 2015 before we walked the Tongariro Alpine Crossing:
It is from the wharf precinct in Wellington. Suzanne and I spent a lovely Friday evening on the wharf. It was a warm, balmy evening and everyone was out and about enjoying themselves. Such evenings are few and far between in Wellington.
]]>This is one of the pictures I made of the Clifton Car Park when I was in Wellington, New Zealand late last year after Suzanne and I had walked the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. We spend the day after we returned to Wellington, and before we flew back to Adelaide, checking out some of my old haunts (Island Bay) when I had lived (Evans Bay) and worked in the city as an economist.
I enjoy walking Wellington. On this occasion I was walking in the early in the morning before breakfast. I'd seen the Clifton Car Park late the previous afternoon and I'd walked around it. I found it a fascinating place to explore with a camera.
]]>Myers Lane, Adelaide CBD
This container was just around the corner from where I I lived in Sturt St in the CBD. It was part of the redevelopment (apartments) of an old industrial site. The redevelopment and urban renewal never got off the ground due to the global financial crisis.
]]>This scene is near Kingscote on Kangaroo Island in South Australia. I was on a poodlewalk on a roadway that ran along the edge of the coast. This part of the coast was basically a rubbish dump.
We were staying at American River on Kangaroo Island on a holiday.
]]>I was on my way to Canberra. It was early in the morning and I was driving through the Murraylands heading towards Wellington to catch the ferry across the River Murray. The days journey was to go to Talem Bend, travel the Mallee Highway, and have an overnight stop at Hay in NSW. I was hoping to take some photos of the exposed roots of the redgums along the Murrumbidgee for the Edgelands project.
I was travelling alongside Lake Alexandrina and it was the light and the colours that caught my eye. So I made a cliched 'on the road' photo with my decades old one lens/one camera. It is photography with a rangefinder camera. A spontaneous snapshot with its trace of the real.
Whilst making the photo I realised that the Leica rangefinder film camera is basically a relic in a world of automation and algorithms; in a world where photography is now produced through a mathematical set of rules that work autonomously, without human interference and which are self-correcting. You press the button and the program takes over to produce a data set cheaply and easily. Perfection.
]]>This image was made whilst I was on a photoshoot early one Sunday morning in 2015. I was still living in Sturt St in the city then, so I could easily walk to and around the CBD.
My urban photography----here, here and here--- has come to a standstill now that I am living on the southern coast in the Fleurieu Peninsula.