digital Archives - Page 21 of 34

August 26, 2012

climate change + photography

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.

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August 25, 2012

scoping Bentham Street, Adelaide

I haven’t done much photography on poodlewalks in the last couple of weeks. I have been preparing work for the Shimmer Festival organized by the City of Onkaparinga. I did manage to take a few location shots for a large format shoot with the Sony NEX-7. The location for the scoping was yet another carpark with iron bars to prevent people in a state of despair from jumping off.

It used to be the case that art photography was measured according to the conventions and aesthetic values of the painted image. The latest defence of that position was provided American formalist modernism. But that has changed now, as in the late 20th century the strict modernist boundaries between photography and other media like sculpture, painting or performance became increasingly porous–ie., with postmodernism.

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August 13, 2012

roadside vegetation

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.

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August 6, 2012

urban renewal

I’ve been looking at this new architecture in King William Street off and on for a while. These new developments are a mixture of offices and apartments and they are an indication of the urban re development that is now happening in the southern end of Adelaide’s CBD.

I’ve tried a number of photographs of these buildings from the street. None have really worked. I needed elevation, such as the Southgate carpark. The previous shoot was during the fog, but the buildings looked too drab. They needed some urban light.

So I decided to see what they looked like in the late afternoon as everybody was leaving their offices to go home:

The idea I had was the play of the light afternoon light with a darkened sky. That didn’t happen yesterday but the light was there. It looks all too lush for me.

August 3, 2012

a foggy morning

There was heavy fog in Adelaide this morning and it took until until midday to clear to a sunny day. I took the opportunity during peak hour to go and take a few picture of my local neighbourhood in the fog. I wanted to use a car park in Holland St that is only open on weekdays for some pictures of the southern part of the CBD.

fog, Gilbert St, Adelaide — fog, Gilbert St, Adelaid

It was a scoping exercise for a possible large format shoot as well as interest in what this part of Adelaide would look like in photographed in the fog. There was no sunshine until midday and so the lack of urban light meant that everything looked dull and flat.

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July 31, 2012

walking on a country road

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.

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July 27, 2012

Adelaide: Cheetham salt field

I’ve been meaning to return to the Cheetham salt field ever since taking this aerial picture. I’d been back a couple of times with the poodles on an afternoon walk on the north and west sides looking for a spot to photograph the piles of salt without much luck.

Earlier this week, when the weather cleared for a day, I found a location that I could access to photograph with a 5×4. This picture was taken on the east side of the Dry Creek salt pans looking west.

There are plans to develop the salt field site into a mixed-use urban waterfront precinct. The State Government’s 30 year plan for Greater Adelaide identified the Dry Creek salt field area and the adjacent Globe Derby Park as a “key urban expansion” site.

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July 24, 2012

Adelaide: Gouger St

My local urban neighbourhood in the inner city of Adelaide is changing rapidly due to re-emergence of urban renewal after the global financial crisis and the influx of international students. Since I may be leaving this neighbourhood in a year or so, I’ve started taking a closer look at it–wandering around the Central Market Precinct looking for photographic possibilities amongst the daily life.

And so we step into the technological apparatus of the camera and its relationship to memory and history in modernity. Often what photograph’s preserve as remembered history is the nostalgia arising from a pervasive and intractable sense of loss from the relentless change of industrial capitalism; a relentless change with its desire to overreach history, overthrow all traditions, habits and conventions, in oder to reinvent the future as the line of progress.

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July 18, 2012

Adelaide: Central Market precinct

I’m back in Adelaide after the brief trip to Melbourne. The smallness of the city of Adelaide was a bit of a culture shock after Melbourne. Adelaide really is a regional town.

I decided to spend the early afternoon exploring the area around the Central Market precinct by walking around the edges of the carpark above the market even though the lighting was too harsh. I recalled that the edge of the car park had grills but not wire netting so I would be able to stick the lens of my camera through the grill if the view of the city was any good.

I wanted to see what views the car park offered of the mixture of old and the new architecture, the historical architectural layering of the CBD, and people moving along the street space contained by the build environment.

I was just looking for possibilities to explore with a medium format camera, hand held, as it is possible to get a lens through the carpark grill, or maybe with a bit of luck even finding an open space with no grill so that I could use the 5×4.

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July 17, 2012

Melbourne: near Macaulay Station

The topographic shoot under the South East Freeway on Monday with the 5×4 near the Moonee Ponds Creek was not successful. It took me ages to get to the Macaulay Railway station on the Upfield line from Safety Beach.

I arrived about 11.30 am, set up the camera, took one picture, then the cloud cover disappeared and the midday sun came out. It was too bright for me as was working in dark shadow on the south side of the freeway. So I scoped the picture I wanted to take and packed it in.

As I was leaving to go to the airport on the Skybus the cloud cover returned. Them’s the breaks, I thought.

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