Poodle Walks

August 1, 2012

returning to the Cheetham Salt Fields

Ari and I returned to the Cheetham salt fields early this morning with Adam Jan Dutkiewicz. He is from Moon Arrow Press and the convenor of the Facebook Art Photographers group.

It was a frosty morning and the light on the salt fields around 8.30am was bright and clear. Perfect conditions. I’d gone back to take some pictures with the 5×4 Linhof that I’d scoped on the earlier trip:

I wasn’t happy with the pictures of the salt crystallisation ponds I took with the Linhof. I need to be there earlier in the morning. So I’ll go back tomorrow and have another go around the time the sun lightens up the salt mounds.

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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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July 15, 2012

funky Melbourne

The Melbourne trip is coming to an end. Suzanne leaves for Adelaide today, and I fly out early tomorrow afternoon. The few days have gone real quick.

This picture is from Thursday when I visited Smith St, Fitzroy. It’s a little cafe near Johnston Street where I had a quick lunch before meeting up with Stuart Murdoch at the Centre of Contemporary Photography:

Whilst at the CCP I glanced through an old issue of UN. magazine, which featured the work of Eliza Hutchinson who was exhibiting some work in Gallery 3.

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July 14, 2012

Melbourne: a hotel window view

Sunday was a day that Suzanne and I planned to spend together, so early this morning I took some pictures through the window of our room in the hotel. We are on the 15th floor of Oaks on Collins, which is in Melbourne’s CBD and are looking south to the Yarra River, Southbank and Crown Casino.

There was sunshine this morning. I took some pictures because rain is forecast for the next couple of days and there may well be no sun tomorrow morning. Without the sun the urban light is dull and flat.

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July 13, 2012

Melbourne: and it rained

I flew into Melbourne early this morning.

I started taking photos after I checked my gear into the hotel —Oaks on Collins—along Flinders Lane. I had seen a carpark whilst walking on Collins St with my gear from the Southern Cross Station. I hadn’t taken much notice of it before, even though I walk Flinders Lane each time I’m in Melbourne.

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July 11, 2012

Melbourne: Gardners Creek

I’m off to Melbourne early Thursday morning on a phototrip.

This will include being a flaneur in the CBD and a large format photoshoot with Stuart Murdoch around the Glenferrie Bridge that crosses Gardiner’s Creek. I had already scoped it—here and here with the Olympus XZ-1 on my waay back from Tasmania in May.

The topographical project around the bridges and the South Eastern freeway is a working towards an exhibition for the Ballart International Foto Biennale 2013.

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