A lo fi visual diary
My response to the ‘in a vacuum’ post has been to walk the city with a digital camera looking for possible photographic subjects in the central business district for my large format work. I came across a couple of possiblities:
The possibilities I uncovered explore the grungy side of Adelaide CBD. Though grunge is usually associated with the music of the 1990s there is grunge literature of the 1990s that charted the territory of young people living in inner cities.
At long last.
With a new Lord Mayor–Stephen Yarwood — the Adelaide City Council has chosen six sites to be renewed with street art – the Hindley St public toilets, Morphett St bridge west wall and pylons, James Place public toilets, Rundle St UPark York St wall and Topham Mall by the southern entrance.
This is a detail of prisoners and guards at Topham Wall, Topham Mall carpark, Adelaide CBD. The fullscale work–a paste-up by Jason Fox— can be seen here.
This is an example of the poetic option that I was tempted to explore in contrast to the waste series. I mentioned the options in the earlier in a vacuum post. The poetic option is about the image and it has little to do with the literary text’s verbal equivalent of photographic techniques and processes or the use of photography in literature.
Urban poetics is a different kind of photography and one that I have little confidence in. So I don’t do much of it and I have little confidence and no sense of a project. The poetics of urban photography is quite different to the genre of street photography and is often associated with Polaroid photography.
I combined yesterday’s walk into the city to pick up the rubbish for the still life photoshoot with a few snaps. They were taken on the way into Hindley Street.
The initial part of my walk left me rather down. Adelaide is so boring and depressing. Nothing much happens here. Its dead. The streets are empty. The place feels asleep. There seems to be little potential for urban change. Culture here is about big festivals and keeping old buildings from falling down.
I’m back in Adelaide. I wandered through the parklands with the poodles late yesterday afternoon wondering where my photography would go next. I played around with some low light light with the (film) Leica –poetic moments and all that—having a look without taking anything but I wasn’t really enthused.
I was at a loss. Where do I go from here? I felt hesitant. All the large format gear had been left down at Victor Harbor. How was I going to use the 8×10 in the city? You cannot wander the streets looking for the moment with that kind of gear.
I thought that I would start by picking up on the waste project that had been pushed into the background.
Whilst I’ve been down at Victor Harbor this week I have been experimenting with seascapes on the poodlewalks. I want to take photographs of the sea with a large format camera (5×7 Cambo) and to do so in a way that is minimalist, colourist and is from a location that has easy access.
So I have been taking shots whilst on the coast cliff top walks with the poodles:
My starting point was this image done about a year ago. I wanted to go more minimalist.Most of the photograph sketches I’ve down are not all that successful. The above picture is probably the best of them and it is probably where I will start.
One of the places in Victor Harbor that we often visit on our poodle walks is the local rubbish dump. It is situated within a ravine that cuts it way to the sea and borders the beginning of the Heysen Trail in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. It offers some photographic possibilities.
Suzanne walked the Heysen Trail from Kings Beach to Waitpinga Beach this morning. We all walked to the eastern edge of the Newland Head Conservation Park, then the poodles and myself turned back whilst Suzanne walked on. I picked her up at Waitpinga Beach a couple of hours latter.
The last two days of the Tasmanian trip were taken up with Suzanne’s desire to do some walks in the South Bruny National Park. This is just off the coast of southern Tasmania and is separated from the Tasmanian mainland by the D’Entrecasteaux Channel.
Suzanne had agreed to go to the Gordon Dam in the SouthWest National Park if I went to Bruny Island. I knew very little about the island, other than it was once a centre for extensive whale hunting in the19th century, so I was happy to tag along.
We stayed in cabins in the Adventure Bay Caravan park. The Fluted Cape walk was on the agenda in the morning, and the Labillardiere Peninsula Circuit in the afternoon. We managed the former not the latter.
One of the areas that I’d wanted to visit in Tasmania was the barren and often bleak landscape around the western edge of the Great Lake in the Central Highlands region. I’d seen it briefly on a previous trip last year and thought that it looked interesting.
The highway, which runs along the western side of the Great Lake, is sparsely populated with groups of fisherman shacks. I could only explore this architecture briefly as a rain storm was sweeping in from the west. There was no chance of using the 5×4.
The only real opportunity I had to do a photowalk yesterday on the trip from Hobart to Tasmania was at Oatlands, a historic Georgian town in Tasmania’s Midlands
The westerly wind was strong and bitter. It was extremely chilling so I didn’t hang around for too long, exploring the Georgian architecture that the town is known for.