This scene is near Kingscote on Kangaroo Island in South Australia. I was on a poodlewalk on a roadway that ran along the edge of the coast. This part of the coast was basically a rubbish dump.
We were staying at American River on Kangaroo Island on a holiday.
I was on my way to Canberra. It was early in the morning and I was driving through the Murraylands heading towards Wellington to catch the ferry across the River Murray. The days journey was to go to Talem Bend, travel the Mallee Highway, and have an overnight stop at Hay in NSW. I was hoping to take some photos of the exposed roots of the redgums along the Murrumbidgee for the Edgelands project.
I was travelling alongside Lake Alexandrina and it was the light and the colours that caught my eye. So I made a cliched 'on the road' photo with my decades old one lens/one camera. It is photography with a rangefinder camera. A spontaneous snapshot with its trace of the real.
Whilst making the photo I realised that the Leica rangefinder film camera is basically a relic in a world of automation and algorithms; in a world where photography is now produced through a mathematical set of rules that work autonomously, without human interference and which are self-correcting. You press the button and the program takes over to produce a data set cheaply and easily. Perfection.
This image was made whilst I was on a photoshoot early one Sunday morning in 2015. I was still living in Sturt St in the city then, so I could easily walk to and around the CBD.
My urban photography----here, here and here--- has come to a standstill now that I am living on the southern coast in the Fleurieu Peninsula.
The Hay Plain in NSW is a space that people drive through on their way from Adelaide to Canberra or Sydney. It is treeless with scrubby saltbush, and it is commonly seen by those viewing it through their car windows as a flat, barren, featureless and bleak space--especially during the day in mid-summer. I find this space fascinating as it is very atmospheric with the changing light, clouds and rain.
Hay is an overnight stop for me on the Adelaide and Canberra trip and I usually stop and take photos. This picture was made on a 2015 trip to Canberra as I was driving into Hay on the Sturt Highway:
The light was starting to fade and I only had the time to quickly make a couple of photographs. I stopped the car and wandered around whilst the road trains roared past. I noticed the bits of cotton moving over the road and along the ground from the wind and the road trains. I laid down on my stomach on the side of the road and made some snaps before the light went.
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.
This picture was made whilst I was travelling along the Sturt Highway from Adelaide to Canberra for a photo shoot along the Cotter River:
I'd stopped to take some photos of a silo just past Wagga Wagga in NSW with the 5x7 Cambo monorail. I then wandered around the site and I saw this history of times past in rural Australia.
The silos for the storage of grain prior to rail transport to markets closed down at the start of the 21st century. The Kywong branch line of the Main Southern Railway line in NSW, which services Wagga Wagga, closed down in 1975. The closure of the branch lines --eg., the Tocumwal branch line which closed around 1988-- is an indication of the emptying out of rural Australia.
It's a sad history of broken dreams and landscape and place in the form of place attachment that is concerned with the symbolic meaning in early settler Australia. Place attachment is the “emotional bonds that form between people and their physical surroundings. These are powerful aspects of human life that inform a sense of identity, create meaning in the lives of human beings, facilitate community and influence action.
Photography has the ability to aid and create place attachments. Photography is also valuable for interpreting the erosion of Aboriginal culture form the Australian landscape. The 19th century image-makers document the land as the British immigrants settled it, thereby helping create meaning for the settlers and establishes the land as virgin by not effectively including Aboriginals in their narratives.
Photography helped represent the land as empty and by extension created a culture of ownership, plenitude and expanse for white settlement and so covered up the destruction of Aboriginal place attachments for the place creation and subsequent attachment of thew white British settlers.
This image was made in the Ballan forest, Victoria, Australia whilst on a photoshoot with Jason Blake and Judith Crispin during the Ballarat International Foto Biennale in 2015.
This photoshoot took place late in the afternoon, the clouds were coming over and the light was fading on the floor of the forest. We didn't have that much time to do more than walk around with handheld camera's. All of us had Leica M rangefinders that were loaded with film: colour for me, black and white for Jason and Judith.
We had arrived at the location without much time for photography as it had taken us quite a while to find the forest that Judith had explored when she was at Ballarat International Foto Biennale in 2013.
Judith and Jason then left for Melbourne (Judith needed to see her publisher for her book on poety and Jason and to return to work). I went back to the forest the next afternoon with my Linhof Technika IV 5x4 field camera. I managed to expose some large format film before the light faded and the rain swept in. Then it was a drive back to Adelaide.
This picture was made whilst I was on a poodle walk in the early morning. It was made just after sunrise.
It is coastal erosion along the sand dunes at Hayborough, a suburb of Victor Harbor in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. The erosion along specific parts of coast east and west of Victor Harbor appears to be increasing and the Council is only concerned withe erosion alonhg the towns's foreshore.
Just when I'd decided to definitely give up using my venerable Leica M4-P and 35m colour film, and make the definite shift to the cutting technological edge of hand held digital imaging, up pops this image.
It is a simple and nondescript coastal bush growing along the railway line and the picture was made on one of my early morning poodle walks at Hayborough, Victor Harbor on the Fleurieu Peninsula. It is what is usually ignored or a disregarded aspects of the contemporary coastal landscape that would be seen as the "unphotographable" by many contemporary DSLR photographers.
What popped up is photography as poetics. Photography in a quiet voice.
Therein lies the strength of a film Leica ---whether colour or black and white---in today's digital world where the global trend is to product differentiation and short product cycles in which companies reduce costs by re-using as many components as possible. We have reached a point where different digital cameras and systems converge to the same level of performance, and the differences that exist are increasingly irrelevant for the average user. In this world it is the camera's features that become the crucial markers for the tech journalists ever on the lookout for the next big thing to write about.
Photography as poetics points to the mood, feeling and emotion that an image creates or produces. This is a revision of the classical Leica ethos of a camera designed to record daily events as a visual memory: thirty-six memories on one roll of film that are an honest and detailed record of the world.
This picture was made whilst I was travelling on the train to Fairfield in Melbourne.
