These three photos  were  made whilst on a photowalk in the Kaiserstuhl Conservation Park with Adam and Michael  Duttkiewicz and a couple of  their friends at the time.   This would have been a decade or more ago.  It would have been  around the time when I was still living in the city,   re-learning to photograph  in black and white,  and experimenting in seeing in b+w.   

I have not looked at these  files for a decade or more,  as the quality of some of these b+w negatives was poor.  I was embarrassed as they  were underexposed, overdeveloped, and  clumsily  composed.    

The scanning by the lab  was  done for the appearance of digital and not  for analogue -- it was  over-sharp.   The software that I had at the time  (an early version of Lightroom, if I recall )  was  basic, and  I couldn't do much  editing the scanned files.    I did go and buy my own scanner as I wanted the  softer appearance/presence  of  film. 

 I didn't bother to go through these archival  files  to see what is actually there.  I dismissed them and forgot about these archives.    Until now.  

Read more

I've started experimenting  with digital black and white whilst making some seascapse with the 5x4 Linof Technika IV  and colour sheet film. The weather condition chosen   was the mist and fog hanging around Encounter Bay on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula over the Xmas/New Year period (2023-24).  

I've never had much success with digital black and white conversions from a colour digital file using the Sony A7 R111--- the results have always been disappointing, as  the images have  looked bland and muddy.   The recent seascapes and fog offered me an opportunity  to experiment to see if I could create something better.   The above 'behind the camera' image is an example  of  this experiment.  

Read more

We  leave Adelaide for Melbourne tomorrow morning.  We are staying  at Safety Beach  on the Mornington Peninsula in Melbourne with my sister Karen.  Jyl, my other sister,  will  be driving down  from Canberra. It's a family reunion of sorts---my birthday.   Ari, our 14 year standard poodle, will travel with us. We will be away from Adelaide for around 11 days. 

I've started  to research what happened to the Ramindjeri people, the traditional owners of the land,  after the conquest of their lands and British settlement of  the Fleurieu Peninsula. The settler history is a narrative of  from pioneer port to seaside resort' and this narrative is premised on the the ‘great Australian silence’ in regard to Indigenous people and their history. 

The research is  for the second historical  part of Fleurieuscapes project.  The art historical context of the project is that Australian arts practice abandoned the landscape in the 1960’s at the end of Modernism, the last major figures being Williams, Nolan and Olsen as arts practice entered post modernity and deconstruction. Whilst there are notable exceptions (Storrier, Robinson etc.), landscape representation was left to Aboriginal peoples as Aboriginal painting emerged from the deserts of Central Australia. 

The second  part of the Fleuriescapes project looks at the  significant  historical sites of the Fleurieu Peninsula from the vantage point  of the traditional owners (both the Ramindjeri and the Ngarrindjeri) in  a post-colonial Australia. This history is one where many of the traditional people living on the Fleurieu Peninsula and along the Corrong  were massacred. Those who survived had the power to govern their lives removed, as well as their connections to the land and the space, and as well as their language to articulate their view of what had happened to them. 

The picture below is of the site of an old sealing/whaling station at Encounter Bay, Victor Harbor  that preceded British settlement. The contact  is circa 1830's,  and one of the prime reason  for the Europeans to make contact with aboriginal people was to seek women. Eventually,  some of the Ramindjeri men and women  worked as harpooners and whale spotters. 

 There was another  sealing/whaling station at  Granite Island in Victor Harbor  Many of the Ramindjeri people succumbed to the small pox epidemic which swept the area in the 1830s and then to general disease.  In 1872 the whaling industry, which had started on Kangaroo Island around 1806,  and which produced whale oil  and bones for export,  closed down due to a lack of Southern Right whales.

Read more

This picture was made in a grove of olive trees in the eastern Adelaide parklands adjacent to Victoria Park.  This grove of  olives, was planted in the 1870s,  is connected to early colonial horticulture,  is considered to be a part of Adelaide's history and  is of historical significance.  

I recall that I had a couple of hours   to fill in for an appointment at the optician so I wandered around the grove  with a hand held medium format camera. The pictures were of the trunks that were close to  the base of the olive tree,  and I recall having to wait between  the various exposures  for  the patchy clouds  to cover the sun.

It was largely a scoping exercise as I was planning on returning at a latter  stage to reshoot with a tripod that was able to open out flat on the ground. I have yet to return. It's often the way. 

Halls Creek Rd is a part of the Heysen Trail. It runs not south and and it is where I often walk in the evening with the standard poodles. It  offers protection from the strong,  southern coastal winds and it has lovely afternoon light.   

This picture was made in the  late winter. There are fields where sheep and cattle graze  on the western and eastern sides of the road. This, in effect, is a strip of roadside vegetation between farmland.  A lot of the spaces on the Fleurieu Peninsula are like this. Most of the land has acquired capital value and has become a commodity. There is no Arcadian  natural simplicity that stands in opposition to, and a compensation for,  urban life in the postmodern city here. It is the landscape of white settlement. 

It all looks quite different in late spring as the green grass has dried  and it has become a golden brown. It would be a different photo in summer. Late spring, however,  is not a good time to walk along  back country roads,  such as this one  with the standard  poodles.  The dried grass seeds along the side of the road become caught up in the poodle's woolly coats and they are very difficult to get out. Miss one and they spiral their way  into the body within 24 hours. 

Read more

This picture of  porous limestone rocks was made at Venus Bay on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia in 2013. It is just south of Streaky Bay.  We were on a weeks holiday there with Heather Petty. Whilst there I  avoided  photographjng the panoramic  landscape views of the  cliffs and the Great Australian Bight and focused on the details which fascinated me.   

It had been many years since we had last been there,  and I'd never forgotten this part of the Eyre Peninsula.   Yanerbie, with its massive white  sand dunes that extend up to 4.5 km inland from the coast, was firmly planted in my memory, and  it is a favourite  photographic location of mine for photographing  landscapes in South Australia.  Landscape, currently has an inferior status in the  contemporary visual arts. It's not a fashionable subject in the art  institution. 

The picture was made on the headland of Venus Bay in the late afternoon along the western part of the South Head Walking Trail which offers views of the eastern end of the  Great  Australian Bight. The small settlement of  mostly fisherman  style shacks that hug the coastline of the bay,  borders the headline,  and  the trail  around it offered an interesting early morning walk for the poodles.  

Read more

This photo is from an  early morning photo shoot at Hayborough, Victor Harbor in  South Australia. It is looking west to Granite Island. Rosetta Head, or The Bluff,  is in the background. 

Read more

I've been mulling over where to next after the Edgelands exhibition  at Manning Clark House in Canberra in November 2014. What project do I pick up and start to work on? Something that is different from the topographical approach of Edgelands. 

I thought that a  modest exhibition of abstractions would  be an easy step as I can select the images from  the archives. They'd be a mixture of colour and black and white and they would include abstractions from the urban and the natural environment. I'm not sure where the exhibition would be at this stage---probably in Adelaide and possibly at the Light Gallery in late 2015. 

Abstractions are a bit passé these days ---retro probably, given the  current emphasis on street photography.  Or  its a niche,  even though abstraction has been intrinsic to photography. On the other hand, there  is the retrospectivity of contemporary art that is nostalgic for, or repurposes,  Modernist art.  We could do without modernism's  main themes: the transcendental, the contemplative and the timeless.  

Read more

I  made some  pictures in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens  using tranny film (Fuji Velvia)  earlier in the year.  It  was part of the Atkins Technicolour's  2014  Summer School Film Challenge.  I was only able to attend the film challenge workshop due to other commitments.  

It was a 40-45 degree day  in high summer and we were  to make our  photos between 9.30am --12.30 pm.  The roll was processed  by Atkins and we then selected one picture from the shoot.  This was then  scanned by Atkins, lightly post-processed by the photographer, then printed by Atkins for an upcoming exhibition.  

My pictures  of bamboo strands in the Botanic Gardens was hit and miss,  and  some of the pictures were badly underexposed. I've just scanned  the two rolls  that I exposed  back then.  I've  quickly converted one of the badly underexposed  pictures  to black and white using Silver Efex Pro 2 to see  if it is possible to  save them:

This  picture  of leaf litter was next to  a strand of bamboo  under some trees that  provided some deep,  open shade and this allowed me   to avoid the summer glare.  I gathered bits and pieces of leaf litter and  some colourful flowers to form a "still life".   

Read more