seaweed still life

This still life of seaweed and granite rocks was made on an early morning poodlewalk:

It was made just before I went on a camel trek in the northern Flinders Ranges.

Cuba St, Wellington

This picture was made in March 2018 when I was walking Wellington in New Zealand for a week or so. This was just prior to my return to Wellington to attend Photobook/NZ:

Like everyone else I hung out in Cuba St, often for a number of hours. I would usually walk up and down the street each time I wandered down to the CBD or the waterfront from the Air BnB studio apartment in Te Aro Valley. It was one of the more interesting streets in Wellington.

logs

Another picture of logs that had been washed up on the beach at the mouth of the Whakatane River at Whakatane in the Bay of Plenty in the North Island of New Zealand. We were on a weeks holiday in the North Island at the time.

The picture was made in the early morning light:

Cyclone Hola had gone through the upper part of the North Island bringing gales and rain in March 2018. The Whakatane River was still swollen when we were there, and a lot of trees, branches and debris had been dumped on the bank by the mouth of the river.

white log

A log that had been washed up on the beach at the mouth of the Whakatane River at Whakatane in the Bay of Plenty in the North Island of New Zealand. The picture was made in the early morning light:

Cyclone Hola had gone through the upper part of the North Island bringing gales and rain in March 2018. The Whakatane River was still swollen when we were there, and it had dumped a lot of trees, branches and debris on the shore by the mouth of the river.

at Magpie Springs

This picture was made during a photo session at Magpie Springs:

It is a pile of burnt logs from a bush fire.

Appearances

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.

Introduction : the post-photographic age?

This is the introduction to the book.

The impact of digital technology on photography was initially seen in the 1990s as a threat to, and a undermining of, the practical tradition of visual representation of the photographic. This was usually expressed in terms of the death of photography, the loss of the real, and the emergence of the post-photographic age.

This kind of understanding signified both a sense of the displacement of photographic practice by the use of digital technology and a sense of epochal change in our visual culture. Digital imagery meant new ways of seeing based on a freedom from the inherent constraints of automatism and realism that tied the analogue photographer to being a mere recorder of reality--a mirror held up to the world. The duality between the photography and the digital image is stark and it is understood in terms of technological means of production.

chance

There is a view that film photography after digitalisation provides a way to create poetry because the convenience of digitalization also tidies things up, correcting mistakes and eliminating chance. If this analogue media of contemporary art involves a backward glance to what has been, as we become ever more immersed in digital media, it also keeps photography open to chance.