The fuzzy experiments continue. This time it is Petrel Cove on a stormy afternoon:
I was sitting in the car in the Petrel Cove car park waiting for the squall to pass before I went for an afternoon poodlewalk with Maleko. I was wondering if I could achieve layers and textures in the photo with everything out of focus.
Though I currently use Facebook and Twitter to spread the word of what I’m doing with my photography I have realised that I have been cutting back on being engaged in social media. My growing dissatisfaction with social media is one part of the deep background changes that are currently happening in the culture of photography.
I post regularly on Facebook (here and here) and Twitter (here). It's basically drop and run. I only comment now and again on posts by friends, or in a couple of groups where there is still a minimal sense of online community. I then leave social media alone. My reason is that I don't really like Facebook and its algorithms, and I detest, if not loathe, its business model approach to the way it collects, stores, or analyzes its users’ data. Facebook is an advertising business that tracks people first and foremost; it is a Big Tech company that aims to become the operating system of our lives.
This kind of negative reaction to social media is probably quite common. Joel Colberg, for instance, has an interesting post on what is happening in photography and social media. His argument is that social media has had a destructive impact on the public sphere of online photography. I agree with him and so I suspect would many other artists.
Even though my leg is still infected and I need to continue with the course of antibiotics, I am able to move around a little more freely now that the stitches have been taken out and the skin healed.
After returning home from the 5 day sojourn in the Flinders Medical Centre I have limited myself to walking down Solway Crescent to the Encounter Bay boat ramp. At sunrise the boat ramp is a hive of activity now that the channel has been dredged. Some boats are already returning at 6am--presumably they have dashed out to check their cray (rock lobster) pots, whilst others are going out for a days recreational fishing with their friends.
I have limited myself to photographing the head and tail lights of the parked 4 wheel drives, then I sit at a table for a while watching the boats come and go in the morning sun before returning home for breakfast before I begin to edit this post. In the late afternoon I repeat the walk. Since this walk is not long enough to exercise the poodles Suzanne has been walking them in the morning and the afternoon.
One of the strands in my style of photography in and around poodlewalks is to shift away from the literal and transparent. My name for this shift is abstraction--ie., finding ways to underscore the photograph as surface, as flat; even though there is an optical space within the photograph. This is often filed by photographic educators under 'ways of seeing' that depend on, and are shaped by habit and convention.
An example of the photograph as surface:
At the opening of the Abstraction x 5 exhibition, which includes abstractions by Graeme Hastwell, Beverley Southcott, Stuart Murdoch, Adam Dutkiewicz and myself, we launched the Abstract Photography book. The exhibition and launch was yesterday at the Light Gallery in Adelaide to a full house.
The book was written by Dutkiewicz and myself, and it recovers the lost modernist abstractions made in the 1960s by Adelaide photographers, has a couple of essays by Adam and myself and a number of abstract photographic images by Adam and myself.
This is an abstract of the trunk of a river gum in the reserve across the road from the studio in Encounter Bay, Victor Harbor
The tree that had been bought down from Arkaroola by Suzanne's mother as a seedling back in 1982 . It was planted in the reserve and it is now a solid tree.
I've taken a number of photos over the Xmas break with a digital camera--a Sony NEX-7--- mostly as a study for a large format shoot. I am thinking about using the 5x4 Linhof in an early morning shoot.
My b+w 8x10 negatives are on the way back to the studio after being processed by Chris Reid at Blanco Negro in Sydney. It seems that most of them are okay in terms of exposures and that only two sheets were fogged.
I've been going through some of my 2011 digital files to dump the ones that are no good and to look for ideas for the next 8x10 shoot. I was using a cheap Kodak EasyShare camera then and most of the work t was playing around with abstractions of dried saltponds on the rock floor at my feet.
These salt pond abstracts are interesting visual ideas, but they are in locations that are too difficult to carry an 8x10 monorail to.They belong to the sea abstract book.
There is little work on visual abstractions in Australian modernism, even though modernism was meant to be the turn away from visual figuration to abstraction.
Abstraction, as it were, was a privileged space of visual modernism (eg., Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich). These artists made anti-materialist claims that actively cultivated particualr forms of subjective transcendence from the practices of everyday life. It was a retreat into idealism--self, mood, dream and spirituality---that ignored the social experience of abstraction.
A photographic abstrction needs to be premised on photography's indexical presence--the index is the name for the inscription of presence that appears to deny the evacuation of the figural in the abstraction.
The weather has been stormy along the southern coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula these last few days. So I have sat on the rocks on the edge of the boat ramp at Encounter Bay, Victor Harbor with a digital camera making abstract photos of the water.
I've started a little series of sea abstractions in the form of a DIY book.
The stormy weather finally has gone from Victor Harbor. Today started with a glorious spring morning--crisp, clear and still. As there was no early morning cloud cover, so the 8x10 black and white shoot that I had in mind was a nonstarter. I needed soft or diffused early morning light for the shoot.
So I took a walk along the boat ramp near Whalers Inn Resort at sunrise in order to photograph the sea at the edge of breakwater in Encounter Bay. I had some abstractions in mind, which I wanted to explore in the early morning light:
The sea is gentle in this part of Encounter Bay, and so I was able to sit on the rocks at the water's edge without worrying that I'd be swamped by every seventh wave. I didn't have that much time before the sunlight became too bright and the highlights on the white caps of the waves blew out.
This is pretty much how I see the rockface in the coastal landscape just west of Victor Harbor and around Kings Head.
It is the constantly changing play of light on the rock forms along the coastline that caught my eye and intrigued me. I tend to see the rockface in terms of abstractions---organic abstractions, as it were. Abstract modernism in this form makes sense to me as a photogrpaher.