The picture below is of  a  large format photo session at Pitkin Rd in Waitpinga on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia engaging with the materiality of the  land: fields, trees, creeks, roads, bridges, signs, rural life of this particular place. It is of a patch of countryside  that emerges from a sense of an intimate relationship to a particular ‘patch of land’.  It is more than space---which is an empty  area or a homogenous,  geometrical space. 

 It is true that representations of  landscape has been  unfashionable  as the recent  photographic  emphasis is on the metropolitan urban where most people live. Landscape is conventionally seen as a  anachronistic genre, part of a old, privileged tradition ‘overthrown’ by Modernism and now of little or no relevance in our overwhelmingly urban, more or less progressive, global culture.  It is seen as the mundane representation of a “mere place”;  an inferior sort of environment that is of little or  no interest.    

The above  picture  is photography as placemaking. An example.   In my  case it is part of the  retreat  from globalisation, given that the second great wave of globalization that started in the 1980s is now over with the  emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic.  

The assumptions of this photography as placemaking approach is that place is a social product and that photography fixes the gaze and pins it down.  The gaze works within the limits of both the moment that is photographed and the spatial limits of the frame. The photographic frame restricts the gaze. The photograph is limited by the perspective of the camera  and the subject is forced to subject their look to the gaze of the camera. 

Yet there is a sense of what is outside of the  photographic frame --a beyond or what Deleuze calls the 'out-of-field' over and above the ‘click’ of the shutter cutting off bits of  objects--tree, road, body parts of a person--- in the photo.  

This photography  as a form of visual representation  of a specific place is  engaged in digitally mapping a local area--ie., exploring place, landscape and environment.   If maps are helpful in finding  a sense of  place, then   being physiologically attached to place is to be embedded in history,  language,  art, and culture. The visual language and culture is now that  of a networked digital network that is characterised by instantaneity, simultaneity, speed of exchange and changeability in both appearance and context. This is one sense of what is 'beyond the frame' mean  when the photo appears in a blog, as is the case here.   

As an example of this sense of beyond the frame  is  the history of Victor Harbor as aseaside holiday place for people living in Adelaide.   As such it is a  place  is viewed through the leans of nostalgia-----the childhood memories of summer holidays at the seaside or countryside.  This past is imagined as a distant place away  from the whirlpool of an industrialized metropolitan modernity. It was imagined as other to the urbanising modern,  even while access to these other spaces was created precisely by the industrial arm of modernisation: railroads,  cars  and other modern communications systems.

So we, the viewer,  imagine the co-presence of two juxtaposed spaces, the space within the frame and the space of the the 'out-of-field' or what Bathes called the  'blind field.'  The photographic frame becomes a border between two spaces.  

So  ‘landscape’ can be seen as the means by which artists engage with issues of place. The modern conception of place defines it  in terns  of  our location in the world – a location in space.  Place as location is a particular region of physical space: a region one can locate, walk towards and  step into. Place is dissolved into space in  modernity and it is reduced  to a geometrical, homogenous region or point within space with no inherent capacity to alter the course of things in the natural world. Place has no being or identity apart from that of space itself.   

 An alternative conception of place anchors place in experience or in the social.  Space is produced. It is a social product, the result of sociohistorical processes. It is socially determined and in constant flux. Flux is a  dynamic process that results from social activity and social relationships.  The particular patch of land that is being photography is part of, and shaped by, a larger social reality. 

Merleau-Ponty made clear in his  Phenomenology of Perception our location is pace is  originally grounded in our immediate bodily location. Photography as placemaking is a way of situating ourselves;  a  mapping of our personal ‘positions’ in terms of an ever-expanding matrix of cultural reference points that help  to form  our sense of our place in the world.