A Mallee landscape near Mantung, in South Australia.
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.
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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.
This picture was made whilst I was on a photo trip to the Cotter River when I was in Canberra in mid-2015 whilst on a photoshoot with Judith Crispin:
It was here that I became away that it is not about the accuracy of representation of the optical designs (the way that Leica choose to stay ahead of the competition and carve out a profile of excellence for their image). Its a move away from the metaphor of the lens is something we see with (a focusing or fiteringinstrrument), rather than something we look at to being about the poetics of the situation in the here and now of making a photo.
That situation is a junction of acting forces and is in flux, is dynamic, and full of energy. The poetics is a representation of the intensity and immediacy of our experience of that local moment in the context of the history of that habitat.
]]>The Hay Plain in NSW is a space that people drive through on their way from Adelaide to Canberra or Sydney. It is treeless with scrubby saltbush, and it is commonly seen by those viewing it through their car windows as a flat, barren, featureless and bleak space--especially during the day in mid-summer. I find this space fascinating as it is very atmospheric with the changing light, clouds and rain.
Hay is an overnight stop for me on the Adelaide and Canberra trip and I usually stop and take photos. This picture was made on a 2015 trip to Canberra as I was driving into Hay on the Sturt Highway:
The light was starting to fade and I only had the time to quickly make a couple of photographs. I stopped the car and wandered around whilst the road trains roared past. I noticed the bits of cotton moving over the road and along the ground from the wind and the road trains. I laid down on my stomach on the side of the road and made some snaps before the light went.
]]>I'd flown into Adelaide from spending several days in Wellington, New Zealand, on a photo trip and I was waiting for Suzanne to pick me up. She had driven up from Victor Harbor to pick me up, but was running late as she was battling the afternoon commuter traffic that was going to the southern parts of the city and beyond to the coast.
So I filled in the time by making some photos around the airport. The light was good.
I was carrying several different cameras with me from the trip, so I quickly played around with each of them as the late autumn light was fading. This is the Leica version.
]]>This picture was made whilst I was travelling along the Sturt Highway from Adelaide to Canberra for a photo shoot along the Cotter River:
I'd stopped to take some photos of a silo just past Wagga Wagga in NSW with the 5x7 Cambo monorail. I then wandered around the site and I saw this history of times past in rural Australia.
The silos for the storage of grain prior to rail transport to markets closed down at the start of the 21st century. The Kywong branch line of the Main Southern Railway line in NSW, which services Wagga Wagga, closed down in 1975. The closure of the branch lines --eg., the Tocumwal branch line which closed around 1988-- is an indication of the emptying out of rural Australia.
It's a sad history of broken dreams and landscape and place in the form of place attachment that is concerned with the symbolic meaning in early settler Australia. Place attachment is the “emotional bonds that form between people and their physical surroundings. These are powerful aspects of human life that inform a sense of identity, create meaning in the lives of human beings, facilitate community and influence action.
Photography has the ability to aid and create place attachments. Photography is also valuable for interpreting the erosion of Aboriginal culture form the Australian landscape. The 19th century image-makers document the land as the British immigrants settled it, thereby helping create meaning for the settlers and establishes the land as virgin by not effectively including Aboriginals in their narratives.
Photography helped represent the land as empty and by extension created a culture of ownership, plenitude and expanse for white settlement and so covered up the destruction of Aboriginal place attachments for the place creation and subsequent attachment of thew white British settlers.
This image was made in the Ballan forest, Victoria, Australia whilst on a photoshoot with Jason Blake and Judith Crispin during the Ballarat International Foto Biennale in 2015.
This photoshoot took place late in the afternoon, the clouds were coming over and the light was fading on the floor of the forest. We didn't have that much time to do more than walk around with handheld camera's. All of us had Leica M rangefinders that were loaded with film: colour for me, black and white for Jason and Judith.
We had arrived at the location without much time for photography as it had taken us quite a while to find the forest that Judith had explored when she was at Ballarat International Foto Biennale in 2013.
Judith and Jason then left for Melbourne (Judith needed to see her publisher for her book on poety and Jason and to return to work). I went back to the forest the next afternoon with my Linhof Technika IV 5x4 field camera. I managed to expose some large format film before the light faded and the rain swept in. Then it was a drive back to Adelaide.
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This picture was made whilst I was on a poodle walk in the early morning. It was made just after sunrise.
It is coastal erosion along the sand dunes at Hayborough, a suburb of Victor Harbor in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. The erosion along specific parts of coast east and west of Victor Harbor appears to be increasing and the Council is only concerned withe erosion alonhg the towns's foreshore.
Just when I'd decided to definitely give up using my venerable Leica M4-P and 35m colour film, and make the definite shift to the cutting technological edge of hand held digital imaging, up pops this image.
It is a simple and nondescript coastal bush growing along the railway line and the picture was made on one of my early morning poodle walks at Hayborough, Victor Harbor on the Fleurieu Peninsula. It is what is usually ignored or a disregarded aspects of the contemporary coastal landscape that would be seen as the "unphotographable" by many contemporary DSLR photographers.
What popped up is photography as poetics. Photography in a quiet voice.
Therein lies the strength of a film Leica ---whether colour or black and white---in today's digital world where the global trend is to product differentiation and short product cycles in which companies reduce costs by re-using as many components as possible. We have reached a point where different digital cameras and systems converge to the same level of performance, and the differences that exist are increasingly irrelevant for the average user. In this world it is the camera's features that become the crucial markers for the tech journalists ever on the lookout for the next big thing to write about.
Photography as poetics points to the mood, feeling and emotion that an image creates or produces. This is a revision of the classical Leica ethos of a camera designed to record daily events as a visual memory: thirty-six memories on one roll of film that are an honest and detailed record of the world.
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