A lo fi visual diary
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:
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.
At long last.
With a new Lord Mayor–Stephen Yarwood — the Adelaide City Council has chosen six sites to be renewed with street art – the Hindley St public toilets, Morphett St bridge west wall and pylons, James Place public toilets, Rundle St UPark York St wall and Topham Mall by the southern entrance.
This is a detail of prisoners and guards at Topham Wall, Topham Mall carpark, Adelaide CBD. The fullscale work–a paste-up by Jason Fox— can be seen here.
This is an example of the poetic option that I was tempted to explore in contrast to the waste series. I mentioned the options in the earlier in a vacuum post. The poetic option is about the image and it has little to do with the literary text’s verbal equivalent of photographic techniques and processes or the use of photography in literature.
Urban poetics is a different kind of photography and one that I have little confidence in. So I don’t do much of it and I have little confidence and no sense of a project. The poetics of urban photography is quite different to the genre of street photography and is often associated with Polaroid photography.
I combined yesterday’s walk into the city to pick up the rubbish for the still life photoshoot with a few snaps. They were taken on the way into Hindley Street.
The initial part of my walk left me rather down. Adelaide is so boring and depressing. Nothing much happens here. Its dead. The streets are empty. The place feels asleep. There seems to be little potential for urban change. Culture here is about big festivals and keeping old buildings from falling down.
I’m back in Adelaide. I wandered through the parklands with the poodles late yesterday afternoon wondering where my photography would go next. I played around with some low light light with the (film) Leica –poetic moments and all that—having a look without taking anything but I wasn’t really enthused.
I was at a loss. Where do I go from here? I felt hesitant. All the large format gear had been left down at Victor Harbor. How was I going to use the 8×10 in the city? You cannot wander the streets looking for the moment with that kind of gear.
I thought that I would start by picking up on the waste project that had been pushed into the background.
I managed to take some 5×7 photographs this morning at Petrel Cove, Victor Harbor, before the rain came in. Just as I was finishing with the two types of landscapes mentioned in the earlier post it started to rain.
It hasn’t stopped raining since. It looks to be settled in for the day. I hope not as the conditions are very still and I’d planned an afternoon shoot of this landscape.
Whilst I’ve been down at Victor Harbor this week I have been experimenting with seascapes on the poodlewalks. I want to take photographs of the sea with a large format camera (5×7 Cambo) and to do so in a way that is minimalist, colourist and is from a location that has easy access.
So I have been taking shots whilst on the coast cliff top walks with the poodles:
My starting point was this image done about a year ago. I wanted to go more minimalist.Most of the photograph sketches I’ve down are not all that successful. The above picture is probably the best of them and it is probably where I will start.
The last two days of the Tasmanian trip were taken up with Suzanne’s desire to do some walks in the South Bruny National Park. This is just off the coast of southern Tasmania and is separated from the Tasmanian mainland by the D’Entrecasteaux Channel.
Suzanne had agreed to go to the Gordon Dam in the SouthWest National Park if I went to Bruny Island. I knew very little about the island, other than it was once a centre for extensive whale hunting in the19th century, so I was happy to tag along.
We stayed in cabins in the Adventure Bay Caravan park. The Fluted Cape walk was on the agenda in the morning, and the Labillardiere Peninsula Circuit in the afternoon. We managed the former not the latter.
The Blue Tiers is in the north east of Tasmania and we passed through it on our way to St.Helens.
The early settlers mined tin in much of the George River catchment area between about 1880 and 1930. The clearfelling of native forests by Forestry Tasmania continues supported by the forestry union, the CFMEU and the Tasmanian government, which provides every incentive to destroy the old growth forest.
Within it is a remnant of an ancient Myrtle Beech (Nothofagus cunninghamii) temperate rain forest:
This was in an area of regenerated rain forest full of ferns and mosses.
One of the reasons for going into the Southwest National Park was to see the Gordon Dam and its effects on the ecology of the region.
Clearly the dam is the iconic symbol of modernity in Tasmania. A celebration of engineering and hydro power. But keeping the lights on in Strahan comes at a terrible cost—the flooding of Lake Pedder and the damming of the Serpentine and Huon Rivers to ensure high water levels of Lake Pedder so that there can be a continual flow of water from Pedder into Lake Gordon via the McPartlans Pass Canal to drive the power station’s turbines.