Finally.
This limited edition book----the background is here---- goes to the printers (Openbook Howden) on Monday, 25th November. The three people who have worked on this book throughout 2019 ---Adam and Michal Dutkiewicz and myself-- made the final corrections to the preview copy on Friday at Dulwich in Adelaide. Hopefully, Openbook Howden will be able to print the book by mid-December, just in time for Xmas It's official launch will be at an exhibition at the RSASA in March 2020.
It has been a major effort to recover some of the art photography in Adelaide from this period, to then organise the diversity of this work into an art history book that looks and feels good in the hand, and to write an essay on the aesthetics of medium specific modernism and its postmodern negation. It is an about an art photography during the 1970-2000 period that was made in a provincial region outside the Euro-American centres, as well as the major Australian cultural centres in Melbourne and Sydney--it's a critical regionalism, if you like, structured around the the classic dichotomy between centre and periphery.
This is a partial art historical text with critical intent, and it is the second volume in the Moon Arrow Press photography series, the first being the Abstract Photography one that was published in 2017. Both books help to give a sense that there was an autonomous art photography tradition in Adelaide in the late twentieth century, as well as to give some indication of its regional breadth and depth prior to the internationalisation of Australian art after 2000. What emerged after 2000 was an unthinking acceptance that whatever appeared in the top-end galleries and auction houses in the major western (Euro-American) metropolitan cultural centres represented contemporary art.
