Thoughtfactory: pictures experiments journeys

brief working notes on various photographic projects

Posts for Tag: book

Adelaide Art Photographers 1970-2000

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. 

Abstract Photography book launched

At the opening of the Abstraction x 5 exhibition, which includes abstractions by   Graeme Hastwell, Beverley Southcott, Stuart Murdoch,  Adam Dutkiewicz and myself,  we launched the Abstract Photography  book. The exhibition and launch was yesterday  at the Light Gallery in Adelaide to a full house.  

The  book was written  by Dutkiewicz and myself, and it recovers the lost modernist abstractions made in the 1960s by Adelaide photographers, has a couple of essays by Adam and myself and a number of  abstract photographic  images by Adam  and myself. 

The full title of the book is Abstract Photography: Re-Evaluating Visual Poetics in Australian Modernism and Contemporary Practice, and it was published by  Moon Arrow Press. It was the  lo-fi version--the artist proof of concept--- was launched. The general reaction was that the history, text and contemporary  images in the book hung together well to form a cohesive whole. We'd got there.