the little places

I find that I often return to the little local places to take my photos, rather than seek to go to the exotic or distant places, such as Shanghai in China; or Zhouzhuang, Jiangsu Province, China; or anywhere in China This is especially the case when I am based in Victor Harbor, as it feels like nowhere, or the edge of the world.

near Petrel Cove

This would be an example. I’ve gone past this rock many times on poodlewalks but I’ve never really looked at it seriously as a photos. I’ve noted it but maybe taken the odd snap, but I’ve never thought—gee that’s a suitable subject for an 8×10. But is it possible using a heavy duty tripod? I’d have to check.

heritage

One of the intriguing aspects of the central market precinct in Adelaide is the heritage buildings that have been preserved and used by the lawyers. It is my local neighbourhood and I often think about how can we respect and celebrate our heritage and meld it with an exciting future. Yet I rarely take photos of it.

Mill St, Adelaide

I decided that needed to change from taking the sporadic photo. I would force myself to start looking at the precinct as a photographer as opposed to being an inhabitant or local who works, lives, shops, and plays in the precinct.

Bam, Pow, Zapp

Our responses to adverts in the city is often a blase one. In moving around the city we rarely distinguish individual advertisements from those of other campaigns and rarely `read’ the advertisement in a classic sense. It’s a defensive mode.

Pulteney Grammar

This is in spite or advertising companies producing urban mappings of the trajectories, speeds, social groups, and experiences in ways that are instrumentally oriented towards selling or promoting those urban `texts’ they write as efficient consumer-targeting material.

a mummy daddy visual language

Photography in the common visual language of the snap shop would be more than an aesthetics of the fragment.This aesthetic has dominated the poetic since the romantics; including the fragment as transmogrified by modernism, high and low, and more recently retooled in the neoclassical form of the citation—ironic and/or decorative—throughout which is called “postmodernism.

Encounter Bay, Victor Harbor

People ofter refer to the common visual language of the snap shop as the mummy daddy language. What is attractive about the visual language of the snapshot is that it is an anti-hierarchical means of organizing knowledge and of recognizing intersections and engagements between seemingly disparate ideas and things.

the ordinary

Engaging with the ordinary in everyday life is both elusive and difficult to represent. It is also difficult to express or communicate what has been represented in an everyday visual language. Is ordinary visual language something other than, or different to, the visual language of our commodity culture? Do we need to unlearn the normal visual language in order to represent and express the ordinary?

beach house, Victor Harbor

I don’t know the answer to these questions.

I do understand that in a society of the spectacle, such as Australian society, much of ordinary life is constructed by consumer culture. In this sense, the shopping mall is the most ordinary environment and shopping the most ordinary activity. Yet, this kind of ordinary in a consumer culture may be quite opposite to the everydayness a photographer might want to evoke.

seeing what things look like as a photograph

When I’m in Victor Harbor I drive past this scene whenever I go to the shops in the car. I keep on looking at it and thinking, ‘ now, that sure looks interesting’. It looks to be a suitable photographic subject. Would it work as a photograph? I kept on looking as I drove to and from the Woolworth’s shopping centre.

Today I decided to incorporate it into a poodle walk, and I took a couple of snaps to see what it would look like as a photograph. If it looks okay as a photograph then what is the best way to shoot it.

Inman River, Victor harbor

This looks okay to me. In fact it’s looks good enough for me to consider reshooting the succulent with a large format camera (5×4) tomorrow afternoon, weather permitting of course.

snap shots

It has been raining in Adelaide for several days straight now. Autumn has gone, winter has arrived. I’ve been trying to take the 5×7 Cambo out between the showers to get some photos of the tree roots of Morton Bay Figs. But I’ve had no luck.

Meet the Whole Family

Although it is clear blue skies when I leave, the apartment, by the time I get to the location the showers are sweeping across the ground. It clears, but then it is too dark and the light is too flat. So I’m down to quick snaps whilst walking the dogs in the parklands.

living in a commodity culture

We are surrounded by the images of our commodity culture whether we are watching tv, walking the streets of the city or working on our computers. The visual signs are everywhere.

Our experience is that we live under the assumption that there is no other way of knowing and being outside the phantasmagoriac realm of representation of commodity culture.

mannequin, Rundle Mall, Adelaide

So I photograph these visual forms. We often sleepwalk through their world, barely conscious of the way they speak to our desires or shape our sensory experience. ‘Sleepwalk’ because I often feel that we are living a dream of what it is to be modern in a world of progress (to a better life or future); a dream woven for us by the culture industry of capitalism.

industrialscapes

I’ve become tired of just taking photos, building a decent archive of images and then posting them on Flickr and my photoblog to share with others. It’s become something of a cul-de -sac. I’ve run out of enthusiasm and becoming jaded.

I have to do something more substantive with the photos—to construct them into a project and publish them in some way. The next step is to begin to work on a project for publication–a DIY book—from the Port Adelaide archive. So I’ve returned to the Port Adelaide arcchive, and starting looking over the work I was doing last year.

Port River expressway

So I am picking up where I’ve left off last spring:–returning to the digital studies I made of the Port River Expressway that were done for a reshoot with a large format camera. The above image is one that I had planned to do. This is another.

grunge

My response to the ‘in a vacuum’ post has been to walk the city with a digital camera looking for possible photographic subjects in the central business district for my large format work. I came across a couple of possiblities:

Cluhouse Lane, Adelaide

The possibilities I uncovered explore the grungy side of Adelaide CBD. Though grunge is usually associated with the music of the 1990s there is grunge literature of the 1990s that charted the territory of young people living in inner cities.