daily walks Archives - Page 26 of 39

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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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 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 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 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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