A lo fi visual diary
The weather has been very stormy at Victor Harbor these last couple of days–cold, wet and very windy. I didn’t bother to do much photography on the morning and evening walks as it was mostly raining on these occasions.
The pictures that I did take before the wild weather came in have been deleted. They were mostly sea abstracts that I took for the book I’m working on and they were terrible.
Last week, on one of our back country road walks looking for possible pictures for the conceptual photography book on pink gums and Xanthorrthoea, Ari and I stumbled across this scene:
It looked good on the computer screen–a candidate for the book— and so we went back on the following afternoon to reshoot it with a film camera. But I couldn’t find it, even though I searched everywhere. As I’d deleted most of the pictures on the SONY NEX-7 I couldn’t retrace my steps from the sequence of pictures. I returned the following morning and started from the other direction of the walk to no avail.
Southerly storms have been hitting the southern coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula since Thursday night. The south westerly winds have been very strong whilst the showers of the last day have been frequent and intense. So it is a matter of trying to walk between the showers and staying away from the cliff tops.
We had one such moment yesterday on the late afternoon walk:
We strolled around the Victor Harbor rubbish dump trying to avoid all the mud, and keeping an a eye on the clouds rolling in. We only had 20 minutes or so between the showers. So there wasn’t much chance to experiment with a digital camera.
Ari and I went walking along a back country road west of Victor Harbor yesterday afternoon looking for more material for the conceptual photography book I didn’t find much in the way of the pink gum and Xanthorrhoea combination, but it was an enjoyable walk along Wilson Hill Rd. I found myself wondering how difficult it would be like to take pictures with a digital field view camera. Would it need to be tethered to a computer?
This part of the Fleurieu Peninsula region is dairy country and there is very little native bush left. This region been extensively cleared.
Thinking in terms of regionalism—the expression of a type of local identity—recalls the divisions between figuration versus non-figuration, and regionalism versus internationalism in the early 1970s where there was an identification of foreignness with non-figuration that was set against an emerging post-colonial regional cultural identity (Antipodeanism) that did not seek to create a national style.
Ari and I came down to Victor Harbor today so that QuikFix Computers could install new digital backup technology for Encounter Studio. I’d been putting it off for ages. Silly me.
In the late afternoon Ari and I walked along Jagger Rd that runs parallel to the coastline.
I’ve photographed this tree along the roadside a number of times with different cameras from different perspectives and lighting conditions. I’ve never really taken a picture that I find satisfactory. I find tree studies are hard. You can get obsessional.
Suzanne, Ari and I spent the day in the McLaren Vale wine region taking in the various exhibitions in The Shimmer 2012 Photography Festival. It was organized around a birthday lunch for Suzanne at Penny’s Hill.
I was really fascinated by Alice Blanch’s Box Brownie black and white landscapes where she is using the technology of another era with all its shortcomings as the basis for a new view of old subject matter.
Ari and I cruised the beach at Encounter Bay this morning at sunrise. It was a warm spring morning. The tide was low, the sun light was soft because of the cloud cover, and there was no wind. There was no one around and we had the beach to ourselves. The clouds disappeared and the wind came up after we’d finished our walk.
These rocks are along the foreshore. They are part of a large mass of rocks that had been put there by the council long ago to protect the footpath along Franklin Parade from the sea. They gleamed in the early morning light. I couldn’t resist taking a snap.
I’ve come down to Victor Harbor after hanging some pictures of the Fleuriu Peninsula in the Tin Shed Cafe in McLaren Vale as part of the Shimmer Photography Festival. It’s very low fi because I cannot afford to have a large exhibition with a substantial body of work. I have to work towards it.
Early last Thursday morning Ari and I walked along the beach near Franklin Parade at Encounter Bay in Victor Harbor. We had an hour or so of fine weather after sunrise before the big storm front was due to hit the coastline.
I was interested in seeing the erosion that is beginning to happen along this foreshore, due to the rising sea levels. These are impacting on the South Australian coastline as well as other parts of Australia’s coastline.
There had been more erosion along this part of the foreshore. The Victor Harbor Council is aware of what is happening, but it’s proactive policy response is to replace the sand, rather than protect the footpath with rocks. Rocks are too expensive. But they will have to do something more substantial than sand as the option of planned retreat is not feasible here.
I’d recovered sufficiently from the torn ligament in my lower back to be able to walk with Ari on a back country road on Sunday afternoon, and to use the digital camera to explore the roadside vegetation for future photographic possibilities with a large format camera.
It was a back road that we’d walked with the dogs many years ago, but I’d forgotten about it until I started working on this project. I started it on the Saturday whilst at Encounter Studio in Victor Harbor, and it emerged out of this previous post on poodlewalks.
These back country roads that run between farmland (mostly dairy cattle) are roads connecting the main cross country across the Fleurieu Peninsula. There is no sense of the Romantic sublime here amongst the little pockets of remnant roadside bush.
This is agricultural land that has been mapped and subject to human intervention and there is little sense of aboriginal presence. It is what the English would call countryside, and it is all about property ownership with its various fences and gates.
When we were down at Victor Harbor last weekend Ari and I walked along the back country roads on one of our afternoon walks. It was quiet and peaceful with very little traffic–a healing walk through nature. It had been raining and the roadside vegetation looked green and refreshed. As we walked along I started taking a few photos whilst I waited for the sun to go behind a cloud for a large format shoot I had in mind.
There were no conversations on the country path but there was a poetic receptivity to place.
I find the Australian bush very hard to photograph and so I tried to simplify things as much as possible. ‘Walk down a country road on the Fleurieu Peninsula and take ten modernist photographs of pink gum and a Xanthorrhoea’ was the rule I set up. Ari was more interested in taking on the bulls.
In performing this instruction I thought that most writing on Australian photography was in the art history mode that assumed artistic autonomy, authorial agency, medium specificity and its conventions. The photographic art historians –eg., Helen Ennis and Gael Newton— make little or no reference to conceptual art and its core idea that the locus of the work was deemed to be the idea or statement with the work being a performance of that statement.