1. Revisiting an Analogue Past?

    After having an encounter on mlkshk.com over some Nick Cave ephemera, I decided to go digging though my old analog notebooks that date back to my years as a University student from the early ’80s to the ’90s. Boy are there some gems in there!

    A couple of things struck me about the process.

    Throughout the books are polaroids, made in a time when while expensive, still infinite in terms of having another go. Now of course, this is all history, making these rediscovered polaroids all the more poignant. To add fuel to the fire some of these polaroid photographs are showing sings of chemical deterioration. A wonderful metaphor for life and time.

    Be prepared for more scans of these images as I work my way through these books.

    The lesson in all this? Keep an analogue AND a digital journal, my analogue journal entries dwindled considerably around 2004, and stopping altogether in early 2008 for nearly 2 years. Why? I’m not sure?  Rest assured, I have gone back just this year, to keeping both.

    2. 4 months ago  Notes (3)
  2. Some Summer Reading (Taken with Instagram at s2z studio)

    Some Summer Reading (Taken with Instagram at s2z studio)

    3. 4 months ago  Notes (6)

  3. Landscape Photography and Australia

    I had a discussion recently with a fellow photographer while out scouting for locations and waiting for the light to improve, about Landscape Photography in Australia. The discussion prompted me to pick up Helen Eniss’ book, Photography and Australia*. A book that claims to provide an:-

    “original and engaging perspective on Australian culture and history weaves a wealth of vibrant images into a compelling account”

    I was particularly interested in chapter 3 entitled Land and Landscape. It opens with this premise.

    It would be easy to assume that landscape photography in Australia has followed an unbroken line from the 1840s to the present because of the centrality of landscape national consciousness. In the visual arts, in painting especially, the ongoing relevance of the landscape tradition has been taken as a given. However, the situation regarding photography is less straightforward due to the existence of many different kinds of photographic practice, or photographies, within which landscape photography can be found (these encompass amateur photography, the view trade in the nineteenth century, photography for the tourist industry, art photography and wilderness photography).   Furthermore, the importance of landscape imagery across these areas has varied considerably over time. In the are of art photography for instance, there have been some periods - as in the late nineteenth century between the two World Wars -  when landscape held a pre-eminent position, contributing to highly charged debates about national identity, attachment to the land (now commonly described as ‘belonging’)and human relations with nature. At other times, such as the 1980s and ’90s, landscape has barely been evident within art photography and yet has been highly visible in the tourism industry and conservation movement.**

    She finishes out the chapter with the following paragraph.

    And, finally, what of the vexed, interrelated matter of non-Aborigianl Australians’ sense of belonging? While the Australian historian Manning Clark speculated that European settlers were enternal outsiders who could never know ‘heart’s ease in a foreign land, because… there live foreign ancestral spirits’, it now seems plausible that non-Aborigianl Australians are developing their own form of attachment, not to land as such, but to place. Indeed, it has recently been argued that for contemporary non-Aborigianl Australians, belonging may have no connection with land at all. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why art photographs of the natural landscape have lost their currency and are far outnumbered by photographs of urban and suburban environments - after all, it is ‘here’ that most Australians live and ‘there’ that the tourist industry beckons them to escape.***

    Watch this space as I contemplate these ideas and perhaps respond to to them or change direction completely in my own practice. She is right, many many photographers I know focus on their own urban environments. Perhaps this is out of sheer convenience? Personally it is problematic for me to venture into those areas of the Australian landscape that offer anything other than a tourist perspective or a environmental one. Yet photographers like Paul Caponigro, Minor White and others have successfully photographed the landscape in their own country in ways that have questioned and explored the experience itself. So why can’t Australian Photographers do this?

    *Photography and Australia, by Helen Ennis. Pub Reaktion Books, London, 2007 ISBN-10:1 861189 323X

    **IBID pg 51

    ***IBID pg 72

    [Gary if you read this, I will lend you the book, when you are next in town.]

    4. 5 months ago  Notes (28)

  4. YABWIM*

    Yet another book what I made.*you decide, irony or humour

    I make them regularly ya know!

    5. 6 months ago  Notes (6)
  5. Hubert Burda, art historian and publisher, discuss his new book on this topic. He calls it The Digital Wunderkammer even in translation. Fortunately he explained what he meant: the Internet as the digital curiosity shop of our day represents a turn to the image as our primary means of communication and indeed a new aesthetic.
    Amazon
    6. 7 months ago  Notes (0)

  6. The end of SoFoMoBo!

    Solo Photo Book Month has been running for four years. And what a fantastic four years they have been.
    All good things, however, come to an end. And this is the end for SoFoBoMo.

    Well I enjoyed my 2 attempts, might even give me a small project to work on next year?

    7. 7 months ago  Notes (1)
  7. This is an image from my recently completed SoFoMoBo project. It is in the section that looks at portals from a book about a place called Castlemaine. The book is free to download, and is linked on both the SoFoMoBo website and my own personal website. I enjoyed the project, and I think I may even revisit Castlemaine next year and try my hand at conveying how the town feels to me as an outsider. The one area that I am most disappointed with in my project is the quality of the light, sadly the project occurs in the southern hemisphere’s winter so there is little I can do about this. The afternoon I made this image, the sun peeked out briefly and I managed a few pictures with blue sky and shadows. The rest are soft and evenly lit.

    This is an image from my recently completed SoFoMoBo project. It is in the section that looks at portals from a book about a place called Castlemaine. The book is free to download, and is linked on both the SoFoMoBo website and my own personal website. I enjoyed the project, and I think I may even revisit Castlemaine next year and try my hand at conveying how the town feels to me as an outsider. The one area that I am most disappointed with in my project is the quality of the light, sadly the project occurs in the southern hemisphere’s winter so there is little I can do about this. The afternoon I made this image, the sun peeked out briefly and I managed a few pictures with blue sky and shadows. The rest are soft and evenly lit.

    8. 9 months ago  Notes (0)