There has been very little photography done this last week whilst Suzanne has been away in the Pilbara. There has been the odd snap on when I've been on the poodle walks when the sun was shining between the squalls:
I've had little interest in photography as it as been just too wet.
This picture of the Tobin House, one of Adelaide's Art Deco buildings, made whilst I was wandering along North Terrace in Adelaide's CBD around 5pm. I was enjoying watching the winter light playing across the facades of the buildings along North Terrace.
I was on my way to the opening of Frédéric Mouchet's interesting exhibition at the State Library of South Australia. The exhibition centred around the South Australia of the French explorers in the 18th and 19th centuries in that Mouchet has retraced their journey around the unexplored coast of Nouvelle Hollande, including Kangaroo Island, Encounter Bay (Victor Harbor), Spencer Gulf and the Great Australian Bight.
We stayed a couple of days at Salt Creek in the Coorong on our way back from Adelaide from Melbourne so that I could pick up the second part of the edgelands project after a hiatus. I had been working on the Australian abstraction and Fleurieuscapes projects and I wanted to concentrate on the edge lands associated with the River Murray. I wanted to check out whether the Coorong offered any possibilities.
My starting point was a familiar spot that I knew from when I briefly photographed here several years ago, and I was quite happy to return there and begin to photograph in terms of South Australia landscapes. We arrived at Salt Creek in the late afternoon and I checked out the location for a 5x4 shoot whilst we were on a poodle walk in the late afternoon light.
I was thinking of constructing this low lying lying landscape into horizontal strips of land, sea and sky. The lush afternoon light made the image too picturesque, and it placed too much emphasis on natural beauty for the edge lands project. When I photographed the next day with the 5x4 Linhof it was in flat morning light so that this landscape would look more stark and weird.
A digital version (using the Sony NEX-7) from the photoshoot with the Rolleiflex SL66 (both colour and black and white) this morning. I had come across the rockpool yesterday when I was on a poodlewalk with Ari and Kayla. I needed cloud cover and a low tide to be able to do it.
I had to wait for the low tide so that I could access the site. I needed the cloud cover to soften the early morning sun whilst I waited for the tide to go out. Even then, I was photographing with the sea swirling around my shoes and tripod legs.
Suzanne and I spent a week in the lower part of the North Island of New Zealand. This included Wellington, Tongariro National Park, parts of the the Waikato district and New Plymouth. It was a holiday built around us walking the Tongariro Alpine Crossing.
I was able to do some photography in and around Wellington as well as the standard tourist snaps of the Tongariro National Park. The picture below was made from our room at the Travel Lodge, which was where we were staying whilst in Wellington:
Due to the short time we had in New Zealand, I mainly photographed through the windows of the hotel and when I was walking the streets in the early morning and in the early evening. Walking the city was limited by being on holiday but I was able to build on my previous visit.
Wellington is a very visual city and I enjoy walking it and exploring it's nooks and crannies.These allow me to see beyond the obvious and to find things that are hidden away amongst the ever changing shade and light.
I started on the large format silo project yesterday evening with a black and white shoot of the silos at Talem Bend using the 8x10 Cambo in late afternoon. However, the conditions were not ideal for this kind of photoshoot.
The sun is now quite intense even before it disappears below the horizon, and the clouds that I wanted for cloud cover did not eventuate. There were clouds in the sky when we were in Adelaide, and it looked promising as we drove along the south-eastern freeway to Talem Bend. But the clouds hugged the coastline of the Fleurieu Peninsula coast, rather than moving inland across the Murraylands. So, to my dismay, it was clear blue sky at the silo location.
The next stage of the silo project was organized today whilst I was in Adelaide having a coffee with Peter Barnes and Gilbert Roe at Cafe Troppo in Whitmore Square. This stage consists of a photo trip with Gilbert in mid-October 2015 along the Malle Highway ---probably the section between Pinaroo in South Australia and Toolebuc in Victoria. We have agreed to camp at Ouyen and to make trips out from that base. Gilbert will be using his pinhole camera.
I haven't been doing much large format photography lately. The weather hasn't really been suitable for the large format photography photoshoots that I had planned.
However, I did scope this trunk study on the Heysen Trail though:
The tree was where I'd parked the car to walk along the Heysen Trail of the evening poodle walk. I noticed it in the subdued light as I was driving away at the end of the poodle walk and took a couple of snaps.
It is now generally acknowledged that the photographic image has become firmly established as the predominant form of online imagery, and that photography is now an increasingly pervasive mode of cultural production.
However, the field of photography has expanded to such an extent, with the various social media platforms, digitalisation and the elaborate infrastructure, diversity of technologies and computational processes, that photography's specificity as a specialized discipline or medium no longer makes much sense. Photography is a form of art, not a medium in the sense adopted and developed by modernist formalism in the late 20th century.
We can go further and say that the photographic is no longer best understood as a particular art; it is currently the dominant form of the image in general in western culture.
So we should think in terms of photography in art rather than art photography, since photography plays an important role in contemporary art beyond what we may call photographic art. One aspect of that role was the way that photography was used to change the status and thereby the character of the traditional ‘arts’ of painting and sculpture.
The recent shift to Victor Harbor Life is making it difficult to do large format photography. It has gound to a halt as we sort out all the stuff from the Sturt St townhouse in Adelaide.
I did come across a suitable subject for a 5x4 colour shoot on a recent poodle walk before Kayla arrived, but I cannot get to it for the early morning light at the moment as I am walking Kayla along the Encounter Bay beach at dawn.Nor can I take her yet on a photoshoot as she is only 6 weeks old.
So photography is on hold.