Poodle Walks

October 20, 2012

rock pools

Before we returned to to Adelaide from Victor Harbor Ari and I walked amongst the rocks just east of the road to Kings Beach. I was wanting to do more sea abstracts. I recalled that there was an area of the coast with a small stream from the hills flowing through the rock to the sea and that the rock pools had some strange colours.

The pools looked weird and strange. Were they were conducive to being photographed in the late afternoon?

How would the rock pools photograph as abstractions from nature? What kind of abstractions would emerge? I’d been glancing through Lyle Rexer’s The Edge of Vision:The Rise of Abstraction in Photography–it’s the first book in English to document and contextualize this canon.

Though some of the pictures are formal rather than abstract, and are concerned withe the medium of photograpahy I’ve been impressed by the diversity of the work.

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October 15, 2012

wandering Franklin St

I made this picture whilst we were wandering our way to see the Jeffrey Smart exhibition at the Samstag Gallery. We were to meet up with Suzanne and then look over the exhibition.

It took Ari and myself a couple of hours to get there, as we more or less strolled up and down all the little streets and alleyways between Sturt St and the gallery on North Terrace. There was so much to check out.

I was trying to think through a different approach to photographing the city to the bird’s eye view from the top floor of carparks. I was experimenting as we slowly weaved our way in and out of this part of the city, but I didn’t come up with much.

October 12, 2012

salt abstract

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.

October 7, 2012

in Gilles Street

I’ve finally recovered enough from an illness to start walking the streets around Adelaide with Ari with a camera. It was a short stint around my urban neighbourhood in the late afternoon on the long weekend.My eye was seduced by the windows of an empty shop in Gilles Street. It looked surreal:

The empty shops in the CBD are increasing. People just aren’t spending. Some–eg., restaurants–cannot hang on until the postponed mining starts. So they go bust. Just after making the picture I was hassled by an aggressive paranoid schizophrenic who took great exception to me with a standard poodle walking the streets.

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September 30, 2012

re-tracing our steps

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:

roadside vege, Mt Hill Rd, Victor Harbor

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.

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September 29, 2012

between the showers

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.

September 23, 2012

regionalism?

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.

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September 19, 2012

wandering in Bowden

Ari and I wandered around Bowden late this afternoon.

I’d gone there to check out Fontanelle, as I understood that there was a darkroom there and workshops on alternative technologies, processing and printing called The Analogue Lab. I was looking for a darkroom in Adelaide to develop my 8×10 black and white sheet film. I presumed that this photographic facility is run in association with the Fontanelle Gallery and Studio in Bowden. Everything was closed.

So Ari and I went walking around the streets. I took a few snaps. This picture of industrial forms (Conroys Smallgoods) was in Sixth Street, just down the road from Fontanelle before the Drayton Street corner. I used to work at Conroys when studying at Flinders University and the money I earned there enabled me to set myself up with different types of large format cameras.

Bowden was located close to the city, park lands and the train line and it is where I used to live and work in the 1980s. I had a photographic studio and darkroom in Gibson St near Seventh St, and I used to walk around the area and photograph it with medium and large format cameras. I also spent a lot of time walking in the western parklands with Fichte, my standard poodle.

Though I’d develop the film myself, I was never much good at printing (ie., producing a fine print), so I never exhibited the work about Bowden as a place. I just built up an archive of negatives in a filing cabinet. I’ve started to revisit and to digitalize.

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September 18, 2012

on Jagger Rd, Victor Harbor

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.

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September 16, 2012

walking the city

It has been a while since I’ve wandered the streets of Adelaide on a daily walk with Ari and a digital camera. Today was the first day that I returned to walking the streets taking photos:

I was wanting to take more street level photography for the Adelaide book. The draft is top heavy with ‘birds-eye’ views of the city. I wondered if the digital camera become a tool of the flâneur who walks the city in order to experience the present conditions of daily urban life. This urbanscape in which we live which is often ignored or taken for granted.

The idea of the flâneur returns us to the Situationists concept of psychogeography, which is the practice of exploring places in unpredictable ways within the society of the spectacle. This is connected to a favorite practice of the dadaists, who organized a variety of expeditions, and the surrealists, for whom the geographical form of automatism was an instructive pleasure.

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