This is my first attempt at photographing light per se that I mention in an earlier post. I took advantage of the layer of cloud softening the early morning light.
This is looking east across Encounter Bay from Rosetta Head in Victor Harbor. I did try this approach with an old film camera -- eg., a Rolleiflex TLR (colour negative) to see what happens but the film is still unprocessed.
I live on the coast of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia and, as a result of my early morning poodlewalks along the coast, I I have become very aware of light, and especially the power and violence of light in relation to photography. My usual mode of photography is one of being anxious to minimise or avoid the blinding or excessive light that results in blown highlights. So I would normally photograph in soft or low light situations (using both analog and digital cameras) to manage the excessive and destructive light.
However, as a result of my experiences of the fluidity of light along the coast during this year I have tentatively started to explore light as the subject of photography. It is very tentative though:
The traditional interpretation of light in our western culture contrasts light with darkness, with light standing for vision, reason, knowledge, truth and the real --eg.,as exemplified in the Enlightenment movement. On this interpretation light serves as a transparent medium in which truth and the objective world are revealed. Light unveils, clarifies, illuminates and makes the world around us perceptible and knowable.
I have started to explore the possibilities of seascapes this last month or so using large format cameras -- namely, 4x5 and 5x7-- and photographng in colour.
The location from which I work is Rosetta Head (the Bluff) and the subject is Encounter Bay in the early morning around sunrise. I park the Forester in the top car park over looking Petrel Cove then walk around the northern side of the Bluff and then up the eastern face carrying the camera gear. The 5x4 and carbon tripod are no problem as they fit into a pack, but I struggle with the 5x7 Cambo and the Gitzo tripod.
I have finally begun the necessary upgrades to my digital "darkroom" that is centred around independent content creator and work-from-home. The current set-up has served me well for the last 7 years, but it is finally reaching its use-by date. The software of the Epson V700 scanner has a flaw as it won't scan b+w negatives but I cannot upgrade it as the O/S of the Mac Pro is too old.
The upgrade is going to involve buying new computers around June 2022 when Apple release the more professionally oriented MX Macs; plus new processing software for both still photography and video. The hardware plan is that a Mac mini plus an Eizo screen will replace the old Mac Pro (2009) that I have been using for my film photography. Then I will be able to upgrade the Epson software.
The first step in the longish upgrade journey was to upgrade the operating system of the 27 inch iMac (2015 Intel) that I use for my digital still photography and to download new post- processing software. To my surprise I was still able to upgrade the macOS for the iMac from the macOS High Sierra that I had been using to the recently released macOS Monterey. (I thought that the 2015 iMac would be too old to upgrade to the latest macO/S).
My fingers are crossed as I'm hoping that the iMac has the capacity (processing power) to be able to use process the 4K videos from the recently acquired Panasonic SH1.
During the last couple of months as the La Niña event with its cooler, wetter conditions has been weakening I have been regularly exploring the local Waitpinga bushland in the early morning. This is after walking with Kayla along a dusty back country road for 30 minutes or so. The explorations are all 30 minutes in duration are they are designed to get to know the bushland and to find some suitable material ---possibilities-- for a large format photo session.
This picture of some roadside vegetation, just after sunrise, was made on New Years day. After looking art it for a couple of weeks I've decided that it is a possibility worth photographing in the right light. Light is crucial here. Thankfully, it is easy to find, even though it is just as easy to walk past without noticing it --- which I have done on many an occasion, even when I have been looking out for it.
The bushland explorations have taken quite some time to uncover the photographic possibilities. The scoping sessions using a digital camera are of fragments of the bush -- a tree trunk here, a branch there, an old log on the ground there abouts. I then have to remember where these possibilities are so that I am able to find them on the next exploration. Sometimes it takes me a week or more to re-locate some of these possibilities; some because there are times when I can never find them again.
In the 1970s and 1980s a Leica M4 rangefinder with a 1970s 35mm Summicron lens was my carry around film camera. It worked extremely well and I was very comfortable wandering the streets using the camera without a light meter. Some say that this was a classic M -- the apex of the minimal analog, hand-crafted design. But it was on the cusp of fading into oblivion in the face of a newer technology of the 35mm SLR from Japan (Nikon F) from the early sixties. The latter was a steady trend which increased even more during the 1970s and 1980s.
I used the M4 extensively for the Bowden Archives and Industrial Modernity project, especially for the black and white photos in the Snapshots and Bowden sections.
I dropped the Leica M4 onto a concrete floor in the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane's South Bank in the 1990s. The rangefinder mechanism broke and it could not be repaired in Australia. The camera body was misplaced and then lost for approximately 25 years. The 35mm Summicron lens, which had sat in a cupboard was eventually used on a digital Sony NEX-7 in 2014. I bought the Sony E mount so that I could use the lens.
Then the Leica M4 body was found around 2018. Unfortunately, the rangefinder mechanism still could not be repaired in Australia as there were no second hand rangefinder mechanisms. Over the next couple of years I saved up some money and I sent the body back to Leica Camera in Wetzlar, Germany in 202 to be repaired. They put in a new rangefinder mechanism and refurbished the body. They did an excellent job --- the 1970s camera is like new.
Art photography is often about journeys along winding tracks and trails, some of which lead to no where.
Sometimes these journeys are in the form of working on projects over a long period of time. Eventually an archive of photos builds up and we start to wonder what can we do with these photos over and above showing them in the the odd physical exhibition that is quickly forgotten and only exists on a CV. Often these projects are then put to one side, we forget about them, and we move onto new projects.
The MA was something best forgotten. I'd failed. I was embarrassed by the failure. I realized that it had became normal for people to do MFA's, complete them, and then teach/lecture/research photography in a university, such as RMIT. My old b+w photos just reminded me of my shame over my failure. I was now happy just making new photos like most other photographers.
One day, when I was bored, I started going through my old black and white archives. I saw a body of work sitting there, asked a few friends to look at it, and then to help me quickly draft up a dummy photobook. I showed the dummy to a few people, then put it into the background. The dummy photobook was a bunch of photos of Bowden. However, that didn't really make sense of the old MA, since the text was missing, and it was the text that I had struggled with so long ago.
In a recent post on his art blog the art historian Sasha Grishin makes a useful distinction between a landscape artist and an environmental artist. Grishin is writing about an exhibition featuring the landscape work of John Wolseley, Mulkuṉ Wirrpanda and Mary Tonkin.
He says that:
"The basic distinction between a landscape artist, in the old-fashioned understanding, and an environmental artist, is that a landscape artist stands in front of something to capture, convey or depict it, while an environmental artist is part of the landscape or environment and seeks to convey it, its rhythms and patterns, from the inside."
A 2017 collaboration between Wolseley and Mulkan Wirpanda is here.
I slow walk in nature and I make photos of minutae:
The question is: how can photography explore how we dwell and move within landscape or country? How can photography relate the minutiae of the natural world -ie., shell, feather, seaweed - to the abstract dimensions of the earth's dynamic systems?
What puzzles me as I slow walk in the littoral zone on the poodlewalks and often photograph the minutiae in this coastal world is how do I relate this minutiae to the earth's dynamic systems in a photographic way?
I recently went on a field trip to Lorne and the Great Otway National Park in Victoria with the Melbourne based large format photographers. Like the previous visit, it was a short trip - we ( Suzanne, myself and the standard poodles) only spent a few days staying at an Airbnb at Aireys Inlet. Accommodation along the coast of the Great Ocean Road was extremely hard to find. It appears that everybody is travelling around Australia with the national borders closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Lorne itself was packed. There were people everywhere including at Erskine Falls.
I hit my physical limits carrying my Gitzo aluminium tripod and Linhof 5x4 Technika IV up a series of steps to Swallow Cave at the top of the Sheoak waterfall. It was the tripod that did it: -- the Gitzo is heavy and unwieldy and it hurt my neck and back when strung across my shoulders. I really struggled. It is the lightest tripod that I own, but I had to take rests to ease the strain on my neck and back.
Consequently, the next day when I walked along a forest path from the Blanket Leaf Picnic Area to the Cora Lynn Cascades and back I knew I could not carry the Gitzo aluminium tripod and Linhof 5x4 Technika IV; even though it was just a couple of kilometres on a moderate grade walk to the Cascades.
I'm just going for a walk in the forest I told myself. I'm going to enjoy myself in the Otways. To hell with lugging heavy gear. I saw this part of the creek on the way down to the Cascades. It was in a very dark corner, it was raining, and so it was a very low light situation.
I just carried a Sony A7 R111 digital camera with me. It works well handheld in low light. The Cascades themselves were nothing much so I photographed this section of the creek on the way back to the picnic ground. It was no longer raining.
Hamish McKenzie, in addressing the attention economy on the Substack blog, refers back to the old (pre-social media) internet and blogging. This is internet history. That was then. We now live and work in the attention economy with its environment of perpetual digital distraction where companies (eg., Facebook and Google) are targeting our attention to make money. Their business model is the monetisation of attention to passively consume through governing modes of participation within the system. Facebook's software has the capacity to produce and instantiate modes of attention as well as to track and process user data across the web. This is an infrastructure that works invisibly in the background to shape forms of sociality.
What has emerged is a techno-culture of perpetual distraction--all those pings, pop-ups, notifications that cause us to be perpetually distracted. Rather than democratising the public sphere, social media replaces it with a global Freudian id, in which everyone’s darkest impulses collide, and rational debate becomes difficult.
So we need to critically think about the role of Facebook's network of friends in our lives, how it affects our mental capacities and predicts our future interests.
So how might we critically engage?
McKenzie say that Substack, which is an independent publishing platform based on a subscription model, is a place where writers are rewarded not for doing the things that capture attention but instead for doing the things that respect readers’ trust. Substack emerged as a digital publishing platform from a frustration with:
"how the quality of discussion has been degraded on social media. We are dumber on social media than we are in real life. We are less forgiving, less willing to listen and understand, and more prone to dismiss and then torch our ideological opponents. That, after all, is how we earn internet points....the incentives that underpin today’s dominant internet media businesses have led to tribalism and groupthink ... With an ad-based business model you have to play for scale, which isn’t always conducive to good discourse. To make any meaningful money in such a model, media producers have to generate millions of ad impressions."
He says that the old internet internet felt like a less hostile place then, and there were fewer heat-seeking algorithms that sought to transmute attention into gold. Substack, as a counter force to social media he adds, frequently references that blogging era, and it seeks to recapture some of what made it special.