Via designboom: Hiroshi Sugimoto is having a retrospective that includes his seascapes. Like Kenna's work there is a simplicity to these photographs but without the stark and strong contrasts that dominate Kenna's compositions.

When working in a public space Sugimoto chose to use the technology of the camera to shroud the visuals in a blurry mist to see what remained. This is closer to Titarenko's visual capturing of human movement through an area. Both use photographic technology to seek non-obvious forms that are permanent in transient and fluid scapes.

Micheal Kenna explores a meditative and silent world in black and white. His pictures are absent humanity but contain the urban, suburban and industrial components of human society. The landscapes are very contemplative in what are often very crowded areas.

Kenna's work is in contrast to Alexey Titarenko's which are filled with layer upon layer of human movement in a public space. Kenna's work is dominated by the absence of human movement in photographic space and consequently is less ghostly and more serene despite the similarity of the landscapes chosen.

In his Towards a Philosophy of Photography Vilém Flusser describes a world fundamentally changed by the invention of the "technical image" and the mechanisms that support and define industrialized modern culture. For him, two major events divide history: the first was the invention of writing (supplanting images); the second was the invention of photography (supplanting or beginning the process of supplanting writing). He argues that whereas ideas were previously interpreted by written account, the invention of photography allows the creation of images (ideas) taken at face value as truth, not interpretation that can be endlessly replicated and spread worldwide.

As writing was a way to bust magical image thinking, photography can be a means to bust linear thinking for a fresh approach to making sense by using a new kind of images.

Photography for Flusser is more than a tool in the hands of the individual. He thinks in terms of the camera and its user as the ‘apparatus-operator complex’ that is coded by various programs - for instance, that of the photographic industry that programmed the camera; that of the industrial complex that programmed the photographic industry; that of the socio-economic system that programmed the industrial complex; and so on.

What is of interest here is firstly, the notion that a technology is a bearer of forces and drives, is indeed made up of them. Secondly that it is composed by the mutual intermeshing of various other forces that might be technical, aesthetic, economic, chemical: that might have to do with capacities of human bodies as affordances- and which pass between all such bodies and are composed through and amongst them.

It's a case of walking backwards isn't it, when it comes to saving the River Murray. They--irrigators, river communities and state governments, are still looking back to the golden times, and hoping that they will return. History turns in circles apparently. What goes round comes round as it were.

dead tree, originally uploaded by poodly.

Too little, too late, and far too slow. That's my judgement on the big plans by the state and commonwealth governments to save the stricken reaches of the lower Murray River. It's mostly talk and little action, isn't it.

I have posted this image of the Franklin River in South West Tasmania before in relation to wilderness photography in Tasmania. This time it is the poster used by the Wilderness Society in its successful political campaign to save the Franklin River from being damed by the Hydro Electric Commission.

Conservationists had previously lost a campaign in the early 1970s to prevent the powerful Hydro Electric Commission flooding Lake Pedder for a power scheme. On July 1, 1983 -- 25 years ago today -- the High Court ruled by a majority of one that the Hawke Government had the power to stop Tasmania building the dam. The Franklin continues to run wild. It was an iconic victory.

The centre of Trifid Nebula Daniel Lopez (Observatorio del Teide)

The task of the Mars Exploration Rovers, which were launched to Mars on June 10 and July 7, 2003, are to search for answers about the history of water on Mars. The indications are that Mars had a wet past. The twin rovers landed on Mars in January 2004, 45 months ago, on missions originally planned to last 90 days.

Moving from place to place, the rovers perform on-site geological investigations. Each rover is sort of the mechanical equivalent of a geologist walking the surface of Mars.

Alexey Titarenko uses the technology of the camera to trace the passage of time in a public space; visually capturing the dynamics of mass human movement through an area. The resulting imagery is quite stunning.

The ghostly aspect of the images is impossible to avoid and gives the photos a stark haunting quality. I suspect the use of black and white photography for this is necessary as colour would ruin the uniform nature that grey scale gives to the ghostly apparition of mass movement.

I watched a DVD of Joni Mitchell earlier this evening. It was Mitchell Joni-A Woman Of Heart And Mind: A Life Story. Like most commentary it concentrated on the early singer songwriter period rather than the experimental artist.

This track is from Shine, her latest album:

Mitchell would have to be the most significant female musician in popular music, even though the music business had worn her down to the point where she couldn’t write and didn’t want to write. There was also little public recognition for her work and none at her record company.

Ingeborg Tyssen (1945 - 2002), the Sydney based photographer, is often acknowledged as one of Australia's leading art photographers. Along with Carol Jerrems and others she became part of the canon of Australian art photography. We seemed to lost contact with the canon for some reason. Does digital represent a new start?

Tyssen’s early photographs were taken in the streets and suburbs of 1970s Australia and America and they depict urban aloneness and isolation mixed with a hint of surrealism. This would now be seen as pretty straight, old school black and white modernist photography.

Photographer harassment has become a hot topic as photographers are increasingly being treated as perverts and terrorists. It is not clear that you would be able to take this kind of work today. It is much safer to do this. Or this.

Basically though, if you are on public property, you can shoot it. However, public property and publicly accessible places are two different things. Train stations and beaches are public property, Westfields and other shopping malls aren't. They are private property. See Andrew Nemeth's excellent account.

The irony is that if you go to a shopping centre, service station, train station, carpark, office block (your office block) then you are probably being photographed. The law would say that once you own land you get to control what goes on there. The basic problem is that so much of our space these days is out of public hands and in control of private enterprise.

Are we going to see the Internet remain a uniquely open space in which people can create and borrow and learn? Will it break down the elitism in the arts? Or will it become just like television and be all carved up with advertising, where everybody’s directed here or there based on the presence of some advertiser’s investment?

My gut feeling--reinforced by these comments---- is that the digital divide has morphed into a cultural divide, which involves not only access to technology, but also access to the money, training, and time that it takes to be a full participant in online work.

The internet has fostered the amateur in opposition to those people who are held to have special talent, and are separated, given special attention, and are seen as professional artists who "serve" society.The obverse is the tendency to denigrate the amateur.

Our desperation to break the spell of instrumental economic reason-- eg., by turning to beauty as the unexchangebale or non-commodifiable ---can lead us to fetishise art. We want to believe that art has power that points toward a better world by modelling a non-instrumental relationship with a thing.

This desire can become a trap. Art as the imago of the unexchangeable leads us to believe that there are things in the world that are not for exchange’ in a commercial culture that corners the market in all appearances of alternativeness. Roses are bought and sold just as much as soap powder in the marketplace.

Beauty cannot be contrasted with the ugliness of an industrial culture because is beauty is utilized to sell clothes in a consumer culture. Consumer culture has wrapped itself in beauty to persuade us to buy commodities on the credit card.

But what exactly does art photography transgress besides a few advertising and design l clichés? Can we seriously, for example, claim that abstract colour photography generates an experience of the sublime? And is it not hyperbole to describe art photography as horrifying or terrorising?

When the act of transgressing becomes ‘hot’ as in the fashion industry, then transgression no longer stands in a critical relation to an affirmative culture.

I spent part of Sunday afternoon walking around my old photography ground in the industrial areas of Bowden and Mile End. Bowden was where I had a photographic studio and where I taught myself photography with a 5 X 7 view camera. My old photographic stomping ground was Bowden, Mile End and Port Adelaide.

I had a studio/darkroom in Bowden and I shot in black and white as I explored the decaying life in a rustbucket industrial South Australia, studied philosophy at Flinders University of SA and tried to disengage from photography mirroring the world.

movement in the rustbucket state, originally uploaded by poodly.

Returning there I noticed there were a lot of changes, especially Bowden, which is being transformed into new suburban housing estates. The old Gas Works had gone along with the working class cottages, the street artists had appeared, and there were even street trees.

This return to my roots was part of gaining a perspective to explore, and get to know how the state of play in photography in South Australia was becoming a culture of art photography now that digital photography has become the norm.

Romanticism in the nineteenth century was a protest against the dark satanic mills of industrial modernity, utilitarian calculation and market capitalism conducted in the name of beauty, or wilderness. This understanding of Romanticism is what shaped my photography when I was teaching myself to shoot black and white photos with a 5 X 7 view camera in, and around, Bowden, Mile End and Port Adelaide in South Australia. This was a world characterized by industrial decay as South Australia was undergoing de-industrialzation.

Today some argue that beauty, which can be found in the most unexpected places in every day life, functions as a tacit critique of the slick advertising and crass commercialism in the business districts of the city. Or the contrast would be between those who sell minerals and see only their mercantile value and the artist who sees the beauty of the stones.

Bowden rose, originally uploaded by poodly.

On this account capitalism has, by default, become the primary lens through which we interpret the world. From within the profit-driven perspectives of capitalism, a world-view more widespread than any other in history, all things are squeezed into financial concepts and therefore look like exchangeable commodities.

Peter Garrett's credibility has suffered ever