skies: am + pm

The photo below was made on the evening of the same day as the morning one. I took advantage of a break in the rain around 4.30 pm to go on a poodlewalk with Maleko along the Heysen Trail near Kings Beach. I was returning to the house in the car from the walk when I saw the skies at the Encounter Bay boat ramp. I stopped to digitally snap the last of the evening light in the sky.

pm, Encounter Bay

Then the temperature started to drop. The following day (29th) has turned out to be cold, grey and wet.

As well as the above digital snaps I have been doing some film photography. On opportunity is to be part of an online exhibition to be hosted by the Melbourne-based Friends of Photography Group in May of this year. Online exhibitions and talks may be a pointer to the future for photography, since  it is becoming clear that social regulation in the face of the pandemic will continue not just for days or weeks, but for months to come. This implies changed behaviour especially when out in public areas.

am, town beach Victor Harbor

Even under the most optimistic scenarios of control and near elimination in Australia and New Zealand, the smallest outbreaks will need to be detected, the immediate vicinity quarantined, contacts traced, tests made widely, and the arrival of foreigners strictly controlled. 

It has become quite apparent that the Covid -19 pandemic has been heavily politicized with lots of misinformation circulated by actors with political agendas. The political context of the next stage of the pandemic, which is going to change many lives for the worse, has become clearer: the Coalition is planning to reboot the economy by simply recycling policies from the neoliberal era:– a return to business-as-usual reforms without any suggestion of holistic reform within a national political framework. The old rhetoric will return–the best measure of the country’s preparedness for a crisis—health, economic, or indeed any other—is the size of its fiscal deficit or its national debt. 

Business-as-usual is going to exasperate existing inequalities with the most vulnerable struggling not to fall through the rapidly widening economic fissures in a near future that is likely to be one of a severe depression. It is going to be a very rocky economic road for many, especially for those in the creative, tourism, education and hospitality industries, given  the precarity of work, owing to the rise of the gig economy and a decades-long deterioration of workers’ bargaining power. 

Behind this economic crisis isf a climate crisis that cannot be addressed by “business as usual.”