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. 

Read more

The digital era has bought an end to the use of the scrappy snapshot to critique aesthetic ideology, the traditional categories sod art and the norms of artistic professionalism.  The snapshot stood for non-artistic ordinariness and artists exhibited them without framing or manipulation and it opposed the aesthetic ideology embodied in the artisanal arts of painting and undercut   photography’s institutional aspirations to the status of painting. 

This avant-garde strategy of negating aesthetic ideology  no longer works with the general incorporation of photography into the category of art, and  large scale  digitalised cinematic photography  inside the portals whose power it once criticised. 

This large scale  photography made since the late 1980s are designed to be viewed on the walls of galleries rather than in the pages of magazines or books. They have assumed a prominent position in contemporary art, acknowledged by grand exhibitions, extensive critical writing and a clearly established  pictorial canon----  Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Luc Delahaye, Beat Streuli, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Patrick Faigenbaum, Roland Fischer, Thomas Demand, Candida Höfer, James Welling and Berndt and Hilla Becher.

Read more

Todays photography is digital plus  computer graphics, which brings incredible capability. Its computational photography. 

This  gives people the  power to create. The future looks to be one of turning the complex physical parts of a camera into software and algorithms making computational photography more of a  data-crunching problem.   

If photography has changed in terms of  faster, better cameras, new processes and workflows, improved storage mechanisms — but  it has yet to fundamentally re-think the actual picture.  Classical  photography assumes a fixed perspective ---photographers freeze a moment, and do so with particular intentions since  the focus, the depth of field, the composition all serve a careful purpose. 

What the classical picture didn't  allow the viewer  was multiply perspectives  within a single picture. The single perspective was that of the photographer. 

Read more

I've always been surprised by the way that the photo made with a film camera was understood as an index or trace of what had caused it. Photography was primarily defined by its technical basis: the way in which light reflected by an object or event in the real world is registered on the film emulsion even though this aspect of the photo-mechanical process has only a small part to play in the meanings that a photograph has.

Even Gilles Deleuze  does not invest photography with the creative and re-creative potential that he associates with both cinema and modern painting. In short, while he highly values other visual artistic forms, he seemingly presents photographic texts as stagnate documents or tools that produce certainty, organize bodies and desires, and iterate hackneyed ideas. He even uses photography as something of a foil to demonstrate the innovation of the cinema and the originality of modern painters. 

Read more

When I was in-between digital cameras I decided that I would only use the Leica as a street camera on my photo trip to Tasmania. I'd given up on a digital Leica --eg., an M9--and decided that I would work with film Leica until a reasonably price range-finder style digital camera came along at a reasonable price. 

 It was a return to my roots as it were when  our visual culture was moving rapidly into a time where the new means of digital and electronic imaging were coming to supersede those of the age of mechanical reproduction. The emergence of 'digital imaging' and a new 'digital photography' was widely sensed as a moment of special significance in the history of media and visual representation,  and this moment was celebrated as a release from the constraints of photographic representation. We had entered a  'post-photographic era'. 

Others responded  to digital image technology in terms of  a cultural panic in which the values and practices of photography were seen to be threatened. This response expressed  a fear  for the demise of photographic truth. The new malleability of the image, it was argued,  would  eventually lead to a profound undermining of photography's status as an inherently truthful pictorial form. 

Read more

By now I  had morphed into a photographer who was straddling the film and digital worlds with little idea  of the digital world was closing in on me,  or was reshaping photography. I was primarily looking at images on the monitor but still thinking  of photography in the old film terms --eg., the snapshot of the Nth Melbourne railway station whilst I was on the road.  

I had  not yet realised that curators  would frame the pushing the boundaries of art photography as  primarily  coming from  the use of computer software to create complex imagery that stood in stark contrast  to the mundane and normal digital photography being produced.  

I was vaguely thinking in terms of self-publishing the best  photographs from my portfolio. Only I didn't really have a portfolio.  Nor was I sure how to go about creating one---other than taking lots of photographs,  selecting the best, and approaching Blurb. 

John Szarkowski challenged the ability of photography to explain large-scale public subjects in both the preface to The Photographer's Eye (1966) and in Mirrors and Windows (1978). In The Photographer's Eye he wrote, "Photography has never been successful at narrative" and he declared the fields of photojournalism and documentary non-effectual in Mirrors and Windows writing, "Photography's failure to explain large public issues has become increasingly clear...Most issues of importance cannot be photographed." He argued that attempts to photograph World War II were unable to explain events without heavy captioning. 

Read more

Some hold that there are  two kinds of photographers, collectors and sculptors. Sculptor type photographers are those who set up a scene,  creating it from scratch,  and then take a picture of it.  In contrast, collector type photographers  wander, bringing things home that they find out in the world and they  often have a vague idea or kind of personal fantasy that they look for out in the world.

The process of wandering is central to my Leica snapshots. When I walk the city my route is seldom pre-conceived and I am not looking for very specific things. I did not  have a list of things to photograph  in my notebook.  I would often walk with the standard poodles. 

Read more

I've started going though the archives on the hard drive of the Mac-Pro  in the studio to see what I was photographing  when I was using  the Leica. I'm looking back  to see if it was  just  snaps or did I start exploring themes? 

Sadly, most of the images look like happy snaps. The pictorial equivalent of the readymade characterised by unpretentious snapshot effects, documentary value, and deadpan anti aesthetic qualities.    They were not the result of a deliberate abnegation of authorial control in favor of chance, accident, and automatism. 

This picture of a window in Clunes, Victoria, circa 2009 is an exception. It's darker than most of the pictures--and  it expresses a  darker side of the senses and imagination than Australia's blue skies and bright clear light: 

It  represents the experiences  caused by unresolved loss, commonly known as a state of mourning. Mourning refers to what has  passed away, leaving  us with only images. It refers to the trauma that loss evokes--in this picture  the loss of the  way of life of the country towns in regional Australia. 

Historically,   Australia was represented and imagined  by explorers and cartographers  as a grotesque space, a land peopled by monsters. It was a place of darkness and convicts.  Its sense of disorientation and complete isolation from the civilised European world was unnerving. The Antipodes were  held to be a dark and evil place, an unconquered territory overbrimming with dangerous secrets.

Read more

For photographers, the digital revolution began in earnest in the early years of the 21^st century. This disruption resulted in cameras transitioning from optical and mechanical devices used to expose film to light, to imaging computers that convert light into electrical charges, which are then processed into digital information. 

 Digital makes  photography so much easier. Digital post-production was a  game changer,   since  good software could suddenly fix a lot of issues and anomalies far more cheaply, and in many cases better, than hardware could manage. The emphasis in digital  was on  resolution--- as if resolution is going to provide the content of the picture.  

With the digital revolution the use of Leica's film rangefinders  was reduced to an even smaller  segment of the market than it had been during  the SLR  film days,  and this resulted in Leica facing  the oblivion of bankruptcy.    It looked as if the rangefinder experience ---the camera was small and light,  its shutter was quieter, it was easy to focus in low light,  and it  attracted far less attention from people on the street--could well belong to  photographic history.   

That rangefinder finder experience shapes  how I look at modern digital cameras. I am looking for one that inherits, and builds on, the rangefinder legacy-- rather the SLR tradition.  The rangefinder  legacy -small, unobtrusive, well-designed, modern in concept, affordable, and offering a high quality user experience--- wasn't really  being made, and so there  isn't a new and modern way to pursue rangefinder photography in the digital era.  Leica's digital rangefinders were not affordable. 

Read more

Digital technology offered a number  of advantages.  It equalled the image quality of 35m film,   it was far more convenient re work flow,  and  it was  far more  cost  effective to use  to making photos on a daily basis. The downside of digital technology is the limited lifespan or built in obsolescence of  the camera body.   These are akin to computers--you can get 3-5 years wear and tear and that is it.  Unlike  the  bodies  of film cameras the bodies of digital cameras are not built to last.   I continued  to use the  Leica M4-P. 

However, since digital  technology  allowed me  to take lots of snapshot photos regularly,  using  a  Sony NEX-7 mirrorless camera  that I could use with my Leica lenses allowed me to use my  snapshot photography to experiment,   play around and  to scope for the large format film photography.   

Read more