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.
I became interested in revisiting the MA. Could I rework the archived photos + text now? If so, then the original fragmentary text and photos would need to be overlaid with memory and history, since Australia is now a post-industrial society and my photos and text referred to a world that was now forgotten history. Could this reworked MA become a photobook project?
I hunted around the studio at Encounter Bay and eventually came across some bits of text from the MA. I read them quickly, started to remember the books that I had been reading at the time and realised that these were still in my library. I flicked through them. I went back to my negatives and started going through those from the 1980s that related to the MA and started to scan them. They looked okay. I tentatively started to re-read other books on the internet, became aware that a lot more material photography had been published. I rejoined two university library's to gain access to books, then began to rework the fragmentary text.
I started a blog in 2016, less because of a desire for recognition, and more to help work through the photos and textual material. I quickly discovered that the UniSA library held no aesthetics whilst the Flinders Uni Library had no new material since when I taught at the uni. I slowly came to realize that there was enough open access material on the internet to help me along the way. Times had changed. The internet had replaced inter-library loans.
It has taken 5 years for me to remember and then slowly recover what I'd been trying to do with the MA. As I re worked the MA in the blog I remembered more and more, and I came across more and more material that was relevant.
Then in early 2021 with the Covid-19 border closures and the Mallee Routes project on hold I created the Bowden Archives and Industrial Modernity website with its 4 sections. Going public like this forced me to seriously work on the text and galleries for each of the sections. It started to feel like being back in PhD mode: -- sitting in front of a computer reading and writing day in and day out until I had a draft to work on.
So this is a photographic journey of 40 years, and it still has a way to go until the book's pdf is sent to a printer. So it is not a tipped- in photobook, or a unique and luxurious object. The website is the public face of the reworked MA--the old desire for recognition?-- whilst I work behind the screen to shape and edit the material for a book.
