The Poodlewalks website (a blog and associated galleries) emerged from the snaps or pictures that I have been making since early 2011, whilst I’ve been on the daily walks with our standard poodles. Initially, when we lived in Adelaide’s CBD prior to 2015 it was Ari and Agtet, and Suzanne did the morning walk (5am) and I did the afternoon one. The Walking Adelaide website emerged from this walking in the city of Adelaide.
After moving to Victor Harbor on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in 2015 the poodles were Maleko and Kayla after Ari died, then Maleko and Maya when Kayla died.
There is a routine to these afternoon walks in terms of walking the same routes and photographing the humble things that other people may not look at; things that I would not normally see if I was walking on my own. The initial idea was to publish some of this vernacular photography that I have been making whilst walking with the dogs each afternoon and afternoon; or on a photowalk when we are away from Victor Harbor.
The general idea is that the poodlewalks becomes a digital visual diary or journal that shows what I am seeing and visually exploring whilst walking with the poodles. This process is an attempt to understand my work by observing and representing the very humble everyday surroundings of my everyday life.
Though it is kind of intimate, like a diary, poodlewalks is constructed as a digital publication and so it is a digital scrapbook with images and text. The image -text relationship is crucial to the poodlewalks project. It is both lo-fi because that is the style of photography that has come from using a Sony digital camera to make the pictures and the aesthetic is that of a snapshot without the usual off-centre framing.
The editing that I do in Lightroom is minimal, and it is mostly corrective in nature, or to enhance the mood of the moment. This post processing has is akin to jotting down an idea, thought, picture that can be worked on with my film cameras and is then connected to text.
What initially unfolded from this process is an increasing use of the digital camera as a way to make a photographic sketch, both to see how the subject looks photographed, and whether it is suitable to reshoot with a large format camera. Side blogs such as the Littoral Zone and Rhizomes where I worked out various ideas then emerged. The final step was to start thinking of the poodlewalks project in terms of a walking art project.
Thoughtfactory is my main website