I've been going through  the archives looking for suitable images  (product) to sell  in the forthcoming online corner store on the Thoughtfactory website . I plan to to sell my photobooks and maybe some prints.   I came across the  pictures  below, which were  made whilst I was on  a Mallee Routes photo-camp at Hopetoun in Victoria in 2017. Hopetoun is in the northern part of Victoria's  Wimmera Mallee.  

The Mallee Routes project is currently on hold.

The first 3 years of the  collaborative section  has come to an end and the participants have gone their separate ways.  The next stage is a solo one to make a  future photo-book. The  Covid-19 pandemic then happened with its lockdown on travel outside one's postcode.  My energies shifted to establishing the online Encounters Gallery and kicking it off with making photos for  The Covid-19 exhibition.  Travel restrictions within  South Australia have now  been lifted for travel within the state, but the SA border remains closed to Victoria. 

I have fond memories of  that occasion.  I camped there for several nights  so that I could explore  the region photographically.   It was foggy on the morning I was due to return to Adelaide and the fog  lasted until midday.   I enjoyed that photo camp,  and whilst I was there I began to think about  the differences between space, location, locale and place with respect to the photography of the Mallee. 

With respect to the above mentioned differences between space, location, locale and place these can be described thus: space is he scientific, mathematized, homogeneous and abstract;  Hopetoun is a location in an abstract space or the exact point at which something is situated; locale  describes the material assembly of a place that gives Hopetoun its  particular look; whilst place is the bounded or limited situatedness of existence. Human existence, as it were,  is always a being in place. 

It was also at Hopetoun that I stopped thinking of the  photograph strictly on its own terms. This modernist position  overlooks  the role of the spectator in a photographic act and it  reduces   photographic productions to the “producer of the image,” i.e. the photographer. The photograph also bears the mark of the photographic event which can either take place in conjunction with the camera and the photographer, or the photograph and the spectator viewing the above photo of a Mallee landscape on their computer screen. The “final addressee” of the event of photography is the spectator, and not the photographer whose role is to initiate the event and, thus, directing it towards the spectator.

There is  a lot of  uncertainty and ambiguity surrounding  photography and its product, the photographic image.