This wood abstraction is from 2013.
It is an abstraction of a tree trunk in the Adelaide parklands:
I would have been on a poodlewalk in Veale Gardens at the time. The tree would have been cut down because it had been damaged in a storm.
This picture of First Creek in the Memorial Garden, Burnside was made around 2010
It was during winter and there had been a lot of rain in the Adelaide Hills and the Mount Lofty Ranges
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.
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.
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.
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.
The post-photography emerged in the late 1980s as a result of the emergence of digital technology.
Digital technology has allowed for the image to be severed from its referent, re-contextualized and re-presented. The theory goes that notions of representational truth in photography have well and truly been destroyed in light of technology that recasts the image as a fluid entity. The emergence of new digital technologies has undercut our trust in the photograph, which more than any other kind of image as faithfully documenting the reality of the material world. We have relied on it to describe places, to prove things existed, and to recall the memorable. This confidence we have warranted in traditional photography, was irrecoverably shattered by the emergence of new digital technologies --hence the concern over the ‘loss of the real’.
However it was not the digital camera that gave birth to the post-photographic, it was the scanner as digital cameras have only become sophisticated enough to be taken seriously in the last decade. In the 1990s scanners were generally used to digitize portions of chemically processed images that were then manipulated and assembled in Photoshop. The combination of this hardware and software meant that artists were almost forced to supplement montage for traditional straight photography that depended upon the indexical power of photos. It is this technology and workflow, and not digital photography per se, that was the condition for the emergence of the post-photographic.
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.
For photographers, the digital revolution began in earnest in the early years of the 21st 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.
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.