I made a couple of abstracts whilst I was in Christchurch for my mothers's funeral. This one was made when I was wandering around the CBD. It was near Cathedral Square:
I had spend the morning wandering around the CBD thinking that I should come back and photograph what I was seeing by way of a destroyed city.
In February, just before going to Tasmania, I dashed over to Christchurch, New Zealand, to attend my mothers' funeral. She was 97.
I stayed in a motel in Papanui Rd, Merivale with my sister. In the early morning I would walk down to the local shops to have breakfast and I would take a few snaps along the way.
Merivale is one of Christchurch's more upmarket suburbs. In contrast, to say Sydenham, it is where the old money is. It didn't seem to have been that badly damaged by the 2011 earthquake. Or if it had, then the insurance money flowed in quickly to repair the damage to the buildings.
I have just returned to Victor Harbor after spending 2 weeks in Tasmania.
The first week was spent photographing on the south west coast of Tasmania whilst Suzanne walked in The Walls of Jerusalem National Park and the second week was spent being tourists primarily in the Tasman Peninsula, south-east of Hobart.
Our base was in Tunbridge in the Midlands which I briefly explored between weeks 1 and 2.
This building was in Campbelltown which is about 20 kilometres north of Tunbridge on the Midlands Highway.
One coastal subject matter that I had started to explore was the dried salt ponds among the rocks along the coast west of Petrel Cove. I had started to scope them with a digital camera. Then I saw the photograph of salt ponds by Christopher Houghton made with a 5x4 camera and decided to photography the ones I'd seen in black and white.
I quickly found them to be very ephemeral--there in the morning, gone in the afternoon. So I spent several days on the various poodle walks looking for permanent saltponds in different locations along the coast. I found a couple and I was ready to go back with a medium format camera.
Then the rains cam after Xmas. It rained for several days and the permanent salt ponds that I had discovered were washed away. A week has passed, and though I have been back every day, the salt ponds have yet to return.
Prior to going to meet Gilbert and Eric at Hopetoun in the Wimmera-Mallee to make some more images for the Mallee Routes project I camped at Murrayville to photo some of the nearby silos. There were a couple of days of overcast conditions in the Mallee and I wanted to take advantage of these conditions to make some 8x10 black and white photos.
This is the silo at Carina, which is just south of Murrayville:
This is going to be a slow project. As it is turning out it requires several hours travelling time, overcast conditions, camping and a few pictures in the morning and the evening at the most. Then the weather changes back to the usual blue sky and bright sunshine and I pack up the photoshoot until the next time.
After the opening of the Mallee Routes exhibition at Atkins Photo Lab in Adelaide I linked up with friends in Mildura to drive to see the Warlpirri's Milpirri Festival at Lajamanu in the Tanami Desert in the Northern Territory. It was a 3 day drive.
This is one of the posters that surround the stage at the Milpirri Festival; the huge painted banners retell the stories from the different family groups that have been learnt.
The photo of the poster was made at dusk with my digital camera. I was at the limits of the capacity of the Sony NEX-7. Though it was an improvement on 400ASA film, I couldn't go beyond 800 ASA. Friends, who were using more modern digital camera's (such as the Sony A7 or the Fuji X-Pro 2), could work with ASA settings 3 times that. Unlike me, they were then able to photograph people at the festival after dusk with minimal lighting.
This is a 6x4 card that will be part of a series of cards in the Mallee Routes exhibition in the new gallery space at Atkins Photo Lab in Adelaide. The exhibition opens on Friday, October 7th, at 7.30 pm.
There are just under 40 cards---Postcards from the Mallee, as it were.
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.
Early this morning on a poodle walk at Petrel Cove:
I hadn't wandered around Petrel Cove for a quite a while and I decided to explore the rocks photographically, given the soft, early morning light.
This is the interim poster, or flyer, for the first exhibition for the 3 year collective Mallee Routes project that is to be held at the Atkins Photo Lab new photography gallery. The exhibition opens on Friday October 7th, and it runs for around a month. It is a work in progress exhibition, that basically says, 'this is how we started the project everyone.'
The poster/flyer was designed by Eric Algra, one of three photographers involved in the project. He is the project member who has the most extensive photographic archives for the Mallee.
The Mallee Routes project has its own website---though this is still in a rudimentary state---with a blog containing a few posts. This means that the project now has a public profile. The overarching statement of the project can be seen here.