In the last month I have been walking in the early morning. with Kalani, our new male standard poodle puppy. He has replaced the recently deceased Maleko. We picked Kalani up in February from Katsto Kennels in the La Trobe Valley in Gippsland, Victoria on our way back from a week’s walking in and around Mt Buller.
Kalani
Most of our walks during the late March/early April period have been on back country roads and the local bushland in Waitpinga, due to the toxic alga bloom along the Encounter Coast. The alga bloom was caused by a marine heatwave and the spread of the bloom was from Goolwa to York Peninsula.
The alga bloom placed the beach off limits, as it had caused the deaths of dozens of marine creatures as well as coughing, sore eyes, and blurry vision amongst humans. It was quickly identified as a type of planktonic algae calledKarenia mikimotoi. It has now cleared enough for us to return to walking on the beach.
These photographic fragments of a walk artwork are a memoriam to those times when Maleko, our silver standard poodle, and myself spent together walking and hanging about in the local Waitpinga bushland in South Australia’s southern Fleurieu Peninsula. It also addresses the question: ‘what are photographers for?’
Maleko had an aggressive rectal cancer tumor that spread through his body in a very short time. He was ten years old. Towards the end he turned to scavenging on the walk, started losing his sight, became disorientated, and failing to keep in touch with me.So the bushland walks had to stop. Maleko’s body eventually collapsed when we were in the Grampians (Gariwerd) in September. He was euthanised in Horsham on Saturday night, the 15th of September.
entry path, Waitpinga bushland
Maleko and I had many photowalks in this bushland over the years and we would usually walk for an hour or more. We would often start on a path made by the kangaroos then just wander around. Our time on these walks were a form of immersion of a being in the bushland in the sense that we become a part of it, and it becomes a part of us. This kind of immersion is a being-in-the-world, rather than a standing outside looking at, and walking through it, as an object.
It was Maleko who lead the way for me to become at home in the bushland and he was much better at mapping it than I was. I would often become dis-orientated and would lose my sense of where I was — but Maleko never did. On those occasions I would follow him back to a familiar trail that lead back to our normal exit point.
exit, Waitpinga bushland
This photowalk references, builds on, and is a continuation of, an earlier one in the local Waitpinga bushland on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. The idea of a walking art in the local bushland frames how Maleko and I enter into, wander around, see and exit the bushland whilst on our morning and afternoon poodlewalks. I would see possibilities. scope with a digital camera, and return the next day to photograph.
This is a construction of my daily morning poodlewalk in the local Waitpinga bushland with Maya, in South Australia’s windy, southern Fleurieu Peninsula. Maya is our standard poodle and is just over a year old. The bushland, which is in Ngarrindjeri country, is paddock size; and it was probably saved from becoming grazing land through Landcare in the late twentieth century.
The construction aims to show that photography is more than the photograph, or the object represented as an image or an artwork . It aims to highlight photography as a bodily activity, experiential process or performance. Walking art presupposes an aesthetics of embodiment — a sentient lived body, rather than just a physical body. Bringing aesthetics closer to the realm of everyday life and practice means bringing the body more centrally into focus. Our sensory perception depends on how the body feels or functions and what it desires, does and suffers.
The walk begins after I’ve parked the car at the Waitpinga Rd end of the unsealed Depledge Rd shortly after first light. We walk along Depledge Rd prior to sunrise judging the length of the walk so that we enter the messy and chaotic bushland just on sunrise. So it is a low light situation photographically speaking in a windy location.
Maya
We start walking by making our way to, then along, some of the trails through the bush that have been made by the kangaroos:
The walking is a haphazard wandering as I keep a photographic eye out for what is changing, ephemeral, momentary or simple. This approach to photography is underpinned by Japanese aesthetics that understands reality as constant change (impermanence or mujo); thatthe world of flux that presents itself to our senses is the only reality; and that we live in the present moment.
light
Being in the present moment is crucial because the early morning light that starts to shine through the trees (pink gums and grass trees) is fleeting, and it is constantly shifting as the sun rises through the trees.
The recently passed 2023-24 summer was certainly a strange one. It was notable for being cool, overcast, stormy, rainy and with frequonr pmnent sea fog and mist. With the unusual weather I went on more early morning poodlewalks with Maya to the Rosetta Head headland (The Bluff or Kongkengguwar) at Encounter Bay than my standard one on Sunday morning.
The cool summer weather provided me with the opportunity to work on the seascape series — both colour and black and white — which had emerged from the poodlewalks in 2023. Maya, though just over a year old, would wait whilst I photographed. Then we’d move on together.
sea mist, Encounter Bay
This was an unusual and unexpected summer as the pattern was one hot day then a cool change for several days, then another hot day. The heatwave didn’t come until early March.
The frequent rains kept the land green until February. Then the summer started with its warm sunny days that the summer beach goers and day tourists were hanging out for. It hadn’t been much of a summer for them up to that point.
It has been about five months since the last post on poodlewalks. Some explanation for the hiatus is mentioned here on The Littoral Zone. Posting on this website was also on the backburner due to the trip to Japan, which took place shortly after the last post in late September 2023. Roughly editing the photos that I made whilst in Japan pretty much preoccupied me for the rest of that year.
The last photos I made before I left for Japan in mid-October were those in the seascapes series on the early morning walks and in the evening ones in the magic hour.
dusk seascape
The archive indicates that even though I was walking with the poodles and making photos in the Nov-Dec period after I’d returned from Japan, I didn’t re-connected to the next step of posting the images on the poodlewalks website.
I mentioned in this Rhizomes post that my still photography that is made whilst walking with the standard poodles in the local bushland has been in the process of changing. It had been changing from photography as a way of objectifying and distancing us from the world towards an understanding that the practice of photography is similar to the practice of meditation. Similar in the sense of paying mindful attention to whatever is occurring in the moment.
This is akin to the immersive processes that Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno called mimesis — – a basic open comportment to the world. Adorno held that a mimetic capacity is spontaneous, pre-reflective, non-conceptual and rational and that it is the moment of the elective affinity between knower and known. We have become oblivious of our immersive mimetic capacity in modernity since in Western history, mimesis has been transformed by Enlightenment science from a dominant presence into a distorted, repressed, and hidden force. In modernity art is a refuge for mimetic comportment.
Initially mimesis as mediative seeing means that the automatic habitual view of the familiar world of an agricultural landscape that I am walking through in the early morning is replaced by being in a space with a keen sense of the unprecedented and unrepeatable configuration of each moment. In the photo below the particular moment of being in the world was a momentary one. The sun suddenly appeared in the background and the mist quickly evaporated.
This embodied clear seeing of a walking photography practice is less a form of contemplative state of mind and more of an empty one coupled to bodily awareness. It is a spontaneous intuitive seeing that is pre-conceptual. Embodied because the intuitive seeing is initially more felt and spontaneous than reflective ie., evaluating and judging the view around me for the sake of making a more considered composition.
Suzanne’s broken fibula is healing and she is now walking to strengthen the muscles in her left leg. We are back to normal with our poodlewalks and have started our training (weather permitting) for the upcoming walks (Basho and Kumono Kodo) in Japan in mid-October.
It’s been quite stormy, wet and windy during the first few weeks of spring. I’ve have been caught a number of times in the early morning by the rain sweeping in from the south west. There is little in the way of shelter along the coast and so I was often soaked.
Whilst walking I have been thinking about how the broad drift in photographic culture has been to problematize or reject photography as a realistic and documentary form, even though the actual condition of photography as a networked image is multifaceted and diverse.
My twice-a-day poodlewalks during the six weeks that Suzanne needed to wear her moonboot to help heal her broken fibula were hobbled ones. I was walking both standard poodles, but as I’d badly damaged my back early in that six weeks period I wasn’t able to walk very far. I could only shuffle along in those areas where the two poodles could run free and more or less look after themselves.
The photography was limited during this period. I just carried a digital camera and on many of the walks I wouldn’t even make a photo. Walking 2 poodles with a damaged back wasn’t conducive to photography.
This is one of the photos I did make whilst on a hobbled walk in part of the Rosetta Head Reserve. I would drive to Petrel Cove and then hobble my way around the reserve and through its scrubland in the early morning.
I would usually start this walk 30 minutes or so before sunrise when there was no one around. The walk would be in its final stages as the early morning sunlight flickered across the grasses in the reserve.
Another of the early morning walks involved driving to the carpark on the western side of Rosetta Head, then I’d slowly shuffling my way along its northern side until I reached the eastern end where I could look over Encounter Bay:
I would do this walk on those occasions when there was early morning cloud over the sea before sunrise. I would hope that there was nobody on the top of the Bluff viewing the sunrise, flying a drone or taking photos. I was able to hobble my way back to the car park on the western side of Rosetta Head, The clouds usually dissipated after sunrise, except when the rains swept in from the wast.
This update on making photos whilst walking with Maya along the coast starts to explore ways of augumenting the still photography. Large format art photography has been my way of creating an art work from these poodlewalks, which are embedded in a particular place.
Maya is now between 5-6 months old and she is quite comfortable walking for an hour or so with me along the coastal rocks on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. As we are on the cusp of winter in South Australia there is early morning cloud cover, the showers sweeping in from the south west are more frequent, and the coastal winds are much stronger.
Whilst I’ve been on these early morning walks I thought that it would be interesting to find a way to show what Maya is hearing, smelling and seeing whilst she is with me. I have no idea how to do this, but I started wondering how Augmented Reality (AR) could add to these kind of walks; or alternatively what could be added using generative AI for texts written by ChatGPT, or an image using Midjourney.
I quickly realized that generative AI is step too far for me as is that that version of AR with its overlay of digital data on top of the real world that is consumed through a camera-and-sensor-laden headset. There is little point in the latter as few people would have the required equipment that mediates the entire world through screens placed centimeters from users’ corneas that makes the whole world a screen.
However, there is a space for something along the lines of supplementing, augmenting, adjusting, or overlaying reality; such as supplementing the still photography is a video. A video offers sound and movement that would augment the frozen moment of the still photography. I need to do more video as I am not sure about podcasts or films, as is done with MAP‘s. Nor do I have the connections to collaborate with a writer like the SALT project which was commissioned by Art Walk Projects.
My early morning, off-lead walks with Maya, our new standard poodle pup, have slowly become longer whilst she reached 16 weeks and had her final round of injections. The walks have included beaches, coastal trails, fairgrounds, hills and bushland.
What photos I have been able to make were just those on the walk around sunrise. She is too young to wait for me whilst I set up a large format camera on a tripod on Rosetta Head and make a photo:
cup + saucer
Many of the early walks were around the Granite Island causeway as there were piles of seaweed along the beach which Maya played in and loved. It also tired her out so she would then walk along the beach with me.
