Though  I currently use Facebook and Twitter to spread the word of what I’m doing with my photography I have realised that I have been cutting back on being engaged in social media. My growing dissatisfaction with social media is  one part of the deep background  changes that are currently happening in the  culture of  photography. 

I post regularly on  Facebook (here and here)  and Twitter  (here). It's  basically drop and run.  I only comment now and again  on posts by friends,  or in a couple of groups where there  is still a minimal sense of online community.  I then leave social media alone.  My reason  is that I don't really like Facebook and  its algorithms, and I detest, if not loathe,  its business model approach to the way it collects, stores, or analyzes its users’ data. Facebook is an advertising business that tracks people first and foremost; it is a Big Tech company that aims to become the operating system of our lives.

This  kind of negative reaction to social media is  probably quite common.  Joel Colberg, for instance,  has an interesting post on  what is happening in photography and social media. His argument  is  that  social media has  had a  destructive impact on the public sphere of online photography.  I agree with him  and so  I suspect would many other artists.  

Read more

In this post, the Canberra based  art historian  Sasha Grishin outlines the changes  in the art world. Restricting himself to the primary art market Grishin  says that  this market  was a traditional part of the traditional infrastructure for selling art, but now it is  failing to do this. 

Grishin  says that: 

"The traditional structure for selling art in Australia is through a commercial art gallery that picks up fresh talent, and then through the auspices of a newspaper art critic who promotes it to an art buying audience...[However]... In the 21st century, this 19th-century system of marketing and promoting contemporary art is seriously breaking down and the number of commercial art galleries in Australia has roughly halved over the past couple of decades."

He adds that patron visitation rates are poor and, outside exhibition openings many galleries report minimal visitors a day. People complain that they are time-poor and are more likely to visit a gallery online, than participate in the dying ritual of the weekly art gallery crawl. Online sales have not been seriously explored. 

Read more

Even though my leg is still infected  and I need to continue with the course of  antibiotics,  I am able to move around a little more freely now that the stitches have been taken out and the skin healed. 

After returning home from the  5 day sojourn in the Flinders Medical Centre I have  limited myself to walking  down Solway Crescent to the Encounter Bay  boat ramp. At  sunrise the boat ramp is  a hive of activity now that the channel has been dredged. Some  boats are already returning at 6am--presumably they have dashed out to check their cray (rock lobster) pots, whilst others are going out for a days recreational fishing with their friends.  

I have limited myself to photographing the head and tail lights of the parked 4 wheel drives,  then I sit at a table for a while watching the boats come and go in the morning sun before returning home for breakfast before I begin to edit  this post.  In the late afternoon I repeat the  walk. Since this  walk is not long enough  to exercise  the poodles Suzanne has been walking them  in the morning and the afternoon.  

Read more

I spent 5 days in a ward 4GS at  the Flinders Medical Centre (FMC) last week, due to the skin graft on my  leg becoming infected,  whilst  I was preparing for the Mallee Routes exhibition at the Murray Bridge Regional Gallery.  I ended up at the emergency department of the Victor Harbor Hospital on the  Sunday of the exhibition open, then went to FMC early on the Monday morning. I left FMC late on Friday afternoon. 

Though I was on an intravenous antibiotic drip  for the infection every six hours for the 5 days I was ward 4GS  I was allowed to make short walks  outside the ward in-between the 6 hours.  

The  short walks meant that I  mostly  explored the area  around the coffee shop such as  Theo's or the cafe in the Centre for Innovation in Cancer.   I would usually wander around this area  after  treating  myself  to a cup of coffee;  or after dinner at 5pm. 

Read more

Finally. 

This limited edition book----the background is  here---- goes to the printers (Openbook Howden) on Monday,  25th November.  The three  people who have worked on this book throughout  2019 ---Adam and Michal Dutkiewicz and myself-- made the final corrections to the preview copy on Friday  at Dulwich in Adelaide.  Hopefully, Openbook Howden  will be able to print the book by mid-December, just in  time for  Xmas It's official  launch will be at an exhibition at the RSASA in March 2020. 

It has been a major effort to recover some of  the art photography in Adelaide from this period,  to  then organise  the diversity of this work  into an art history book that looks and feels good in the hand,  and to write an essay on the aesthetics of medium specific modernism and its postmodern negation. It is an about an  art photography during the 1970-2000 period that was made in a provincial region outside the Euro-American centres, as well as  the major Australian cultural centres in Melbourne and Sydney--it's a critical regionalism, if you like,   structured around the the classic dichotomy between centre and periphery.    

This is a partial art historical text  with critical intent, and it is the second volume in the Moon Arrow Press photography  series, the first being  the Abstract Photography one that was published in 2017.  Both books help to give a sense that there was an  autonomous art photography tradition in Adelaide in the late twentieth century, as well as to give some indication of its regional breadth and depth prior to the internationalisation of Australian art after 2000. What emerged after 2000 was an unthinking acceptance that whatever appeared in the top-end galleries and auction houses in the major western (Euro-American) metropolitan cultural centres represented contemporary art. 

Read more

I have just realised that I have been quietly picking up an old project----namely,  Edgelands--whilst I have been haphazardly photographing for the Fleurieuscapes project. I hadn't realised that I had been making photographs of drosscapes, as I just did  the photos in passing, and then forgot about them. They sat in the archives until I revisited the site on a  recent poodlewalk.  Then I remembered making the photos. 

'Edgelands' refers to  those non-descript spaces that lie  between the urban and the rural. They are  an ill-defined, constantly changing boundary that separates the city from the countryside. These transitional zones and disregarded spaces can be found anywhere that urban development meets open land. 

The environmentalist Marion Shoard called these spaces “edgelands”  and adding a description of these kind of spaces:

The edgelands are the debatable space where city and countryside fray into one another. They comprise jittery, jumbled, broken ground: brownfield sites and utilities infrastructure, crackling substations and pallet depots, transit hubs and sewage farms, scrub forests and sluggish canals, allotments and retail parks, slackened regulatory frameworks and guerilla ecologies. 

 Shoard usefully  defined these edgeland spaces as “the interfacial interzone between urban and rural”. 

Read more

I recently walked around the  sculpture park at  Granite Island, which is just  off the coast from the seaside township of  Victor Harbor.  The  sculpture park is entitled Sculpture Encounters Granite Island,   and it is organised by  the Sculpture by the Sea people.   It is still not that popular with the locals  who prefer  representational sculptures of seals, birds, whales etc.  However, Victor Harbor is slowly becoming a bit more culturally sophisticated   as it moves away from the cultural conservatism of the early 20th century. 

The walk was on a public holiday in October,  and my walking Granite Island along with the day tourists was  a break from walking  along the back country roads. I was having a bit of time off  from working on the aesthetic essay for the Adelaide Art Photographers  1970-2000 boo, which is to  be published by Adam Dutkiewicz at  Moon Arrow Press  in November 2019. 

October 7th was an overcast day with occasional sunshine. Rain was threatening. This is Peter Lundberg's  bronze sculpture entitled Adam and Eve:

This bronze sculpture  looks good  situated amongst the lichen covered rocks and  low   sparse vegetation  on  Granite Island,  with the sky and sea as its  backdrop.  It fits with the ruggedness of the environment. 

Read more

I recently spent  a weekend photographing at Mt Arapiles with a group of  large  format, film based  landscape   photographers from Melbourne, who come together under  the  Friends of  Photography Group (FoFG).  I  hadn't meet any of the group previously,  and I didn't know much  about who they were prior to this weekend. Since  few of them have their own websites I knew very little about their photography,  apart from what I'd seen on the insightful  and informative  View Camera Australia blog.    

 I don't consider myself  a wilderness photographer,  and unlike the FOPG photographers,  I do not  develop my (colour)  negatives or make fine prints from my  b+w  negatives in a  wet darkroom.  I did, however,  want to link up with some other large format photographers in Australia   who were both serious about their craft  and whose  landscape photography was  location based. FoFG's excursion to the Mt Arapiles-Tooan State Park  was my opportunity,  since  it was closer to Adelaide  than some of FoFG's  favourite  locations  in eastern Victoria. 

There were about 14 of the FoFG who made it to the Mt Arapiles weekend.  Like myself,  several of them camped at the Centenary Park campground,  amongst the various groups of the dedicated and serious rock climbers.   The group was open, supportive, knowledgeable  and generous. I was impressed by a  couple  of the FoFG  using 11 x 14 cameras (both field and pinhole)  as I  struggle to  handle an 8x10.  

 I guess that some of the photography that I  make  along the coast of the  southern Fleurieu Peninsula  would fall within the landscape photography category--eg., the photographs of  the rocks, trees and coastline that emerge from my  various poodlewalks.  So I do have a foot in this kind of landscape photography,  without considering it to be within the tradition of  wilderness  photography.   

Read more

As mentioned in this  post on the Mallee Routes blog my stay at  the 5 day camp at Tanunda with the Lavender Trail walking friends allowed me to travel across, and photograph in,   the eastern Mt Lofty Ranges, the Murraylands and the Murray Mallee. 

The  image below was made on the Randall Rd (B35)  in the Mt Lofty Ranges  near Palmer in the eastern Mt Lofty Ranges.   I was making  my way down the Ranges  to the Murraylands  to  photograph around  the small towns of Cambrai and Sedan,  which  were connected by a railway line in the early 20th century.   

The  drive through the eastern Mt Lofty Ranges  was reconnecting with my past. I had been here before in the 1980s. I do recall jumping the  fences  then.  Even though I had a bit of a wander around I couldn't find the  specific areas that I'd photographed in.  Too much has changed in the 30-35 or so years.  

Read more

 I spent a couple of days swagging  in  the  Overland Corner Reserve  during my  repeat   Mallee Routes photo trip to Copeville and Galga. I stayed  there after the Copeville and Lake Bonney (Nookamka Lake) photo sessions  to try and track  the  Overland Stock Route  (from New South Wales) after it left the township of  Barmera and made  its way around the northern part of Lake Bonney to Morgan.  

The picture below was made for the absent history section of  the forthcoming Mallee Routes exhibition at the Murray Bridge Regional Gallery.  Its location is near the Overland cemetery on the hill that overlooks the floodplain of the Overland Corner Reserve. This floodplain   would have formed part of the Overland Stock Route in the 1840s, prior to it going around the Nor-West Bend of the River Murray at Morgan, then down  to Adelaide.   

The floodplain of the Overland Corner Reserve  is in poor ecological health ---it is  even in a  worse condition than  the Loch Luna Game Reserve, which  lies between Lake Bonney and the Overland Corner Reserve. I presume that this region  in the 19th century was ephemeral --wet and dry depending on the River Murray flooding. With the  construction of the Weir and Lock 3 in  the mid 1920s,  to create storage  for irrigated agriculture,   Lake Bonney became permanently inundated. That meant  both the Game Reserve and Overland Corner floodplain received  very little, if any  flood water.  

Read more