A walking art: ‘in memoriam’

Cambo 5x7 monorail

These photographic fragments of a walk artwork are a memoriam to those times when Maleko, our silver standard poodle, and myself spent together walking and hanging about in the local Waitpinga bushland in South Australia’s southern Fleurieu Peninsula. It also addresses the question: ‘what are photographers for?’

Maleko had an aggressive rectal cancer tumor that spread through his body in a very short time. He was ten years old. Towards the end he turned to scavenging on the walk, started losing his sight, became disorientated, and failing to keep in touch with me.So the bushland walks had to stop. Maleko’s body eventually collapsed when we were in the Grampians (Gariwerd) in September. He was euthanised in Horsham on Saturday night, the 15th of September.

Rolleiflex SL66
entry path, Waitpinga bushland

Maleko and I had many photowalks in this bushland over the years and we would usually walk for an hour or more. We would often start on a path made by the kangaroos then just wander around. Our time on these walks were a form of immersion of a being in the bushland in the sense that we become a part of it, and it becomes a part of us. This kind of immersion is a being-in-the-world, rather than a standing outside looking at, and walking through it, as an object.

It was Maleko who lead the way for me to become at home in the bushland and he was much better at mapping it than I was. I would often become dis-orientated and would lose my sense of where I was — but Maleko never did. On those occasions I would follow him back to a familiar trail that lead back to our normal exit point.

Rolleiflex SL66
exit, Waitpinga bushland

This photowalk references, builds on, and is a continuation of, an earlier one in the local Waitpinga bushland on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. The idea of a walking art in the local bushland frames how Maleko and I enter into, wander around, see and exit the bushland whilst on our morning and afternoon poodlewalks. I would see possibilities. scope with a digital camera, and return the next day to photograph.

a photowalk in the Waitpinga bushland

Sony A7 R11

This is a construction of my daily morning poodlewalk in the local Waitpinga bushland with Maya, in South Australia’s windy, southern Fleurieu Peninsula. Maya is our standard poodle and is just over a year old. The bushland, which is in Ngarrindjeri country, is paddock size; and it was probably saved from becoming grazing land through Landcare in the late twentieth century.

The construction aims to show that photography is more than the photograph, or the object represented as an image or an artwork . It aims to highlight photography as a bodily activity, experiential process or performance. Walking art presupposes an aesthetics of embodiment — a sentient lived body, rather than just a physical body. Bringing aesthetics closer to the realm of everyday life and practice means bringing the body more centrally into focus. Our sensory perception depends on how the body feels or functions and what it desires, does and suffers.

The walk begins after I’ve parked the car at the Waitpinga Rd end of the unsealed Depledge Rd shortly after first light. We walk along Depledge Rd prior to sunrise judging the length of the walk so that we enter the messy and chaotic bushland just on sunrise. So it is a low light situation photographically speaking in a windy location.

Sony A7 R111
Maya

We start walking by making our way to, then along, some of the trails through the bush that have been made by the kangaroos:

The walking is a haphazard wandering as I keep a photographic eye out for what is changing, ephemeral, momentary or simple. This approach to photography is underpinned by Japanese aesthetics that understands reality as constant change (impermanence or mujo); that the world of flux that presents itself to our senses is the only reality; and that we live in the present moment.

Sony A7 R111
light

Being in the present moment is crucial because the early morning light that starts to shine through the trees (pink gums and grass trees) is fleeting, and it is constantly shifting as the sun rises through the trees.