Poodle Walks

September 11, 2012

Leigh St, Adelaide

I’ve been glancing through Anne Marsh’s recent book Look: Contemporary Australian Photography since 1980 (2010) looking at what kind of photography of Australian cities has been done. This work is in the Space section of the text, which also includes suburbs, inhabitants (people in urban settings) and rooms as well as cities.

There is much more photography on suburbs than cities. Surprisingly the photographic representations of cities in the Marsh text is very thin. Disturbingly thin. Australian photographers, apparently, live in the suburbs not the inner city. When they turn to the urban their focus is on people, where they work in the humanist street photography tradition.

There is no text from Marsh on this mish mash of work by Daniel Crooks, Sandy Edwards, Rozalind Drummond, Robyn Stacey, Les Walking, Ian De Cruchy, Simon Cuthbert, Carl Warner and Kit Wise. There is more interesting work on Flickr.

Leigh St in Adelaide has been selected to become the Adelaide equivalent of a Melbourne laneway. It will be closed off to traffic with the hope that it becomes a vibrant space full of people eating, drinking and conversing with friends. The programme to make Adelaide a vibrant and lively place is called Splash.

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September 9, 2012

McLaren Vale: Primo Estate

Suzanne, Ari and I spent the day in the McLaren Vale wine region taking in the various exhibitions in The Shimmer 2012 Photography Festival. It was organized around a birthday lunch for Suzanne at Penny’s Hill.

I was really fascinated by Alice Blanch’s Box Brownie black and white landscapes where she is using the technology of another era with all its shortcomings as the basis for a new view of old subject matter.

September 2, 2012

Encounter Bay: 7am

Ari and I cruised the beach at Encounter Bay this morning at sunrise. It was a warm spring morning. The tide was low, the sun light was soft because of the cloud cover, and there was no wind. There was no one around and we had the beach to ourselves. The clouds disappeared and the wind came up after we’d finished our walk.

These rocks are along the foreshore. They are part of a large mass of rocks that had been put there by the council long ago to protect the footpath along Franklin Parade from the sea. They gleamed in the early morning light. I couldn’t resist taking a snap.

I’ve come down to Victor Harbor after hanging some pictures of the Fleuriu Peninsula in the Tin Shed Cafe in McLaren Vale as part of the Shimmer Photography Festival. It’s very low fi because I cannot afford to have a large exhibition with a substantial body of work. I have to work towards it.

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August 27, 2012

379 King William St

Developers have had numerous attempts since 2006 to develop this building at 379 King William St south. The area is known as the Law Courts precinct and the Royal Caledonian Society building had been bad state of disrepair for a decade or more. Only the facade now remains today.

The most recent proposed development now looks something like this. It is in a strip which has typically got 2-3 storey buildings even though King William St is the city’s major boulevard

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 16, 2012

being-there

After having a look at an exhibition at the A.P Bond Gallery in Stepney I wandered around a bit taking a few photos. It highlighted to me that the intrinsic qualities of the picture was less important than the act of naming it as a work of art and getting the legitimating institutions–museums, galleries, collectors, historians of art etc —to accept the picture as art. What still haunts the art institution is Duchamp naming readymades such as a bottle rack or urinal as a work of art that should be in an art gallery.

I’m not sure where that leaves photography once both the copy theory of representation and an aesthetic canon of conventional forms has been rejected. Are photos functioning to re-enchant the world? They are becoming a sort of magic realism, fetishes or animated objects? A memento mori—ie., a mark of the inevitable passing of time?

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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