The southern part of South Australia has been in drought since last year. There has hardly been any rain in autumn so far -- just a few intermittent showers.   These showers have  not been  enough  to lessen the soil moisture deficiency. There has been no Autumn Break -ie., no  decent autumn rainfall. The cause is  the  slow-moving, high pressure weather systems that have resulted in the persistent warm and dry conditions with their minimal breaks of rain-bearing  weather.

The native bushes along the coast,  which  are adapted to  surviving the long,  dry summer months,  are dying, or have died. The dying bushes  don't look pretty.  They  look ugly and my  experience  of being amongst them  is not one of pleasure. It is an unpleasant experience -- which is different  to  recoiling from the  disgusting or the monstrous. The  possibility of drought from the projected lack of rainfall due  climate heating being  the future gives rise  to an underlying  anxiety and fear.

The ugly is usually seen as the negative of the beautiful in classical aesthetics---the ugly is traditionally understood  as deviation from the norms or practices that set the standards for beauty.  The ugly is an unwelcome phenomenon that, like a weed in a garden, should be avoided in— or eradicated from— landscapes, artworks,  and to be replaced by its purported converse, beauty.

However, photography's  commitment to realism entails the artistic representation of  ugliness. Photographing the effects of drought brings ugliness as an aesthetic value into the foreground,  and it opens up the ugly to being  more than either the  antithesis  of the beautiful,  or the concept of the harmony of both beauty and the ugly.    The category of beauty declines in Modernist art, which also   defied  the traditional prohibition of the ugly -- eg., Picasso's Guernica (1937).  Dissonance is the technical term for the reception through art of what aesthetics as well as common sense  calls ugly. 

Representing the effects of drought involves  shifting away from the traditional subjectivity of artistic intention and  personal expression to photography's  public significance.   What constitutes the aesthetic value of a work on this view is not so much the creative originality  of the individual artist,  but rather the capacity of the photographer's  work to enact for others the moral and political demands of a particular social or natural context--in this case drought.   This  giving voice to the seriousness of photography opens up a space to  articulate the social dimension of the aesthetic. 

The drought highlights how in this public context the ugly as the effects of the ongoing destruction of nature  is a thing unto itself; it has an independent status. It is an aesthetic category of its own.  The role of the ugly is to  reflect the suffering and pain of our culture in order to criticize  it: the force of art in all its ugliness, she suggests, is to function as critique.