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. 

The promise of the avant grade in the  first third of the twentieth century (Dada and surrealism) was a rupture with the  art institution and art's autonomy in a world dominated by the means end rationality of capitalism's exchange value. The avant-garde's attack  focused on autonomous art represented by aestheticism as a necessary step in its project to overcome the separation between art and life. 

  Modernism, as it was usually presented in Australia, was a purely internal artistic phenomenon. Modernism's  claims to novelty, negation and non-trivial experimentation in the late 20th century had  finally diminished in their impact as they have become exhausted. The avant-garde’s attack on the art institution had failed. The art  institution had demonstrates its strength by embracing its attackers and assigning them a prominent place in the pantheon of great artists. Avant-garde categories such as rupture and shock gained admittance to the discourse of art, while at the same time concepts such as harmony and coherence  became suspected. The model of heroic transgression against repressive authority has lost its credibility. 

It is  the art  institution, rather than a work’s intrinsic qualities, that defines what counts as art. So artistic genius is not the source of aesthetic value. The art institution only allows a a few  photographers inside the gate it guards. 

We were driving back to a rust bucket Adelaide from Woomera and Andamooka when I saw this tree in the middle of nowhere. It was the Xmas decorations that caught my eye. The decorative signs humanise  the  empty landscape--what many see as the dead heart of Australia.  Hence the snapshot.

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