We are in Tasmania----we arrived in Devonport early this morning, and we drove down to Strahan on the west Coast via Cradle Mountain after I got Telstra prepaid mobile broadband working.

We started the road trip to Tasmania when we left Victor Harbor around 6pm tonight. I spent the morning setting up the Sinar 8x10 on a studio stand at Encounter Studio and the afternoon re-learning how to load sheet film for the Linhof Technika 5x4, which I am taking with me to Tasmania.

I've since learnt that I'd been sold colour transparency sheet film --Ektachrome 100 --rather than colour negative film I'd wanted. Oh dear.

at Petrel Cove, originally uploaded by poodly.

We are in the apartment in Adelaide tonight and we leave for Melbourne very early tomorrow morning. We need to make the night ferry to Tasmania which arrives in Devonport early Tuesday morning.

I'm preparing for a photographic road trip to Tasmania, starting Monday morning. It covers similar territory to my last trip that was done in 2006. But we are staying longer this time.

As a result I've begun to think about the intersection between photography and history, in a way that is outside the modernist history of photography that is marked by various, increasingly elaborate attempts to distinguish art photography from commercial and amateur productions; and from the documentary photography in bureaucratic institutions such as the police station, the insane asylum, the school and the prison.

For Walter Benjamin, the modern perception of "history" is inevitably experienced in a way that can only be described as photographic, partaking of photography's instantaneity and immediacy, its flash-like character, illuminative powers, its appearance as a fragment or temporal shard, its ambiguous status as both an image suspended in an ever-present and a concrete artifact of the past.

When I lived in Wellington New Zealand I stayed in Hataitai close to, and in the shadow of, Mt Victoria. I used to walked around Evans Bay Parade that ran along the harbor's edge to the CBD. It was in Wellington that I started taking photographs and occasionally I would venture into Newton on a photographic trip.

I didn't have much idea of what I was doing at the time, but I've often wondered if those photographers who lived in the windy city and actively took photos would do in order to construct a historical representation of a disappearing city.

I've just discovered that Andrew Ross, who lives in Newton, has done so. He has actively photographed Wellington's urban landscape since the early 1990s and started using large format equipment in 1996 and began the ongoing ‘Wellington Views’ series, a constantly growing photographic archive documenting the City and its environments. The emphasis is on those older buildings that are threatened with demolition or significant renovation, and the people who make their lives or livings in the buildings.

A portfolio of my work plus an artist's statement has been uploaded onto the Flickr group Omnibus: providing all things (photographic) at once for commentary. Dom Ciancibelli curated the portfolio images.

Omnibus is a site for discussions about photography and one way of facilitating this is through members uploading a portfolio and a brief statement about their work. The assumption of the photographic criticism in the group is to consider photography as art rather than aesthetic ideology that holds that photographic images inhabit an autonomous world of pure forms.

Michael Fried in an essay called Art And Objecthood trenchantly criticised the minimalist art of the time. His main concern was what he saw as the art world’s slide into theatricality theatricality. By this he meant the inclusion of the viewers experience of viewing an artwork into the meaning of the artwork itself – the explicit acknowledgment of the role and presence of the viewer (or beholder), and the shift in emphasis away from the intentions of the creator. Fried championed art (mostly Modernist and Abstract) which effectively ignored the role of the beholder, was complete in and of itself, and which functioned as a direct vehicle for the aesthetic concerns of the artist.

His art history book Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot Fried argued that the same concerns to be at the heart of developments in 18th century French painting. In particular, the anti-theatrical tradition sought to produce art which denied the presence of a beholder by producing work that portrayed people in states of absorption

The figure is immersed in their own world and activities and display no awareness of the construct of the picture and the necessary presence of the viewer. Absorption as a recurrent motif throughout Wall’s work: – often his pictures depict people engrossed in some activity, apparently completely oblivious to the presence of either the photographer, or the eventual beholder.

I have just come across, via the City Room blog of the New York Times, Barbara C Mensch's photo documentation or portrait of Fulton Fish Market in Lower Manhattan and then New York's rapidly disappearing waterfront. She has also photographed the Brooklyn Bridge for nearly 30 years.

These are the worlds of yesterday as the profound change in the urban landscape of New York is sweeping away much of the city’s past. Mensch’s haunting images taken with a Rolleiflex medium-format camera are a reminder of all that was lost.

If the beautiful relates to notions of unity and harmony, then the sublime refers to fragmentation and disharmony, to the moment when thought trembles on the edge of extinction. Thus, the Enlightenment faith in reason meets its suspension in the Romantic fascination with the numinous.

In The Sublime William Shaw says that postmodern culture, which for him, roughly spans the period from the 1940s to the present day (takes a lively interest in the sublime:

Whilst postmodernism retains the Romantic feeling for the vast and the unlimited, it no longer seeks to temper this feeling through reference to a higher faculty. The postmodern condition therefore lays stress on the inability of art or reason to bring the vast and the unlimited to account. In what amounts to a retreat from the promise of enlightenment, its dream of freedom and transcendence, the postmodern affirms nothing beyond its own failure, and it does so without regret and without longing.

Shaw adds that the differences between Romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism can be highlighted in their contrasting attitudes to the unpresentable.

Tony Bridge, the New Zealand photographer is based in Canterbury in the South Island. He divides his time between assignments as a professional commercial photographer, writing and running workshops, both in New Zealand and abroad, as well as developing his art photography.

A graduate of Canterbury University in Christchurch (a degree in foreign languages and literature), he is primarily a landscape photographer, runs an interesting a photographic blog, and, like myself, uses a Sony DSC R1 digital camera as his lead documentary camera. Unlike myself he has several lead (full frame) digital cameras. He runs photographic workshops in the Maniototo district in Central Otago and Lake Waikaremoana in the Te Urewera National Park on landscape photography.

His work is based on using computer software to add layers of meaning and subtlety that enables him to make the crossing from the documentary tradition of photography to the expressive potential of mark-making with a camera and computer. He is both a digital artist and photographer.

I mentioned John O' Malley, the ChCh based New Zealand photographer, in passing in this post about Castle Hill Basin in Canterbury, New Zealand. In his art photography he is primarily a landscape photographer and he recently had an exhibition at COCA in Christchurch entitled Sentinels/Crossings.

Crossings explores the relationship between rural railway road signs and their surrounding environment:

The Craigieburn Range of mountains is located on the south banks of the Waimakariri River, south of Arthur's Pass whilst the Craigieburn Valley ski slopes are within an hour and a half from Christchurch. What is represented here can be interpreted within the New Topographics tradition of human altered landscapes.

Australia Day: --- a barbecue with friends or time spent at the beach. It is a day off paid work. It is also represents the end of the Christmas and New Year holiday period, with people returning from their holiday beach shacks to face the beginning of school and the pressures of work taking off. Today it is all sunshine and smiles. Just another other summer holiday.

There's not enough time to worry about ''What does it mean to be Australian?'' Isn't that last century's anxiety question? And the landing in Sydney Cove is not really felt as an occasion of national significance, even though it was the beachhead for British colonisation.

There are lots of Chinese-made flags everywhere at Victor Harbor: on cars, flagpoles, draped over balconies and on bodies though not many young males wandering the streets wearing outsize flags as capes. Presumably, many are expressing a love for country and celebrating Australia.

The emergence of this site on Flickr has caused me to dig around looking for ex-pat NZ photographers now living in Australia to build on my earlier posts of those Christchurch-based who are serious about their art photography.

In the process I came across Doc Ross, who lives in Christchurch New Zealand, and works predominantly in the South Island, with regular trips around the world. His work is a mixture of still life's, abstract details and landscapes and it is analogue based with an emphasis on the fine print. I find this work intriguing: an abstraction from few small rocks shot in his studio on a winters day:

This is classic photographic modernism concerned the beauty of form that refers back to the black and white work of Edward Weston' still life studies (peppers) and beachscapes.

If one looks back at the brief history of digital photography it becomes very clear that the issues that bothered critics and historians twenty years ago are significantly different from the questions we may need to ask now. For many scholars, the most pressing issues were those concerning the digital image’s ability to represent the Real The malleability of digital photographs was then seen by many as the central element of the digital revolution and caused some to herald the ‘‘death of photography’’, shattering the privileged status of the photograph as ‘‘objective’’ truth.

Today, the low-resolution, pixilated appearance of early camera phone photographs and video clips is now an accepted part of the syntax of truthful and authentic reportage in the same way that the grainy black and white photograph once was. The speed with which these highly compressed JPEGs are transmitted and amalgamated into news media is an indication of the acceptance of the explicitly digital image into the structure of news reporting while emergent practices such as citizen journalism and sousveillance rely on the instant distribution that the networked camera facilitates.

The mass-amateurization of photography, and its renewed visibility online signals a shift in the valorization of photographic culture. If, in the past, the arena of public photography was dominated by professional practitioners, currently the work of specialists is appearing side by side with images produced by individuals who don’t have the same professional investment in photography. As a result, the roles of the professional photographic image and that of a snapshot are changing.

Rather than just continuing to take isolated photos on my wanderings with the dogs on their evening walks I've decided to use my photographic time at Victor Harbor to work towards creating a beach mosaic. This is similar in design or concept to the work of Troy Ruffels and it would be constructed from images of the local coastal environment.

The mosaic would be shot with a medium format on film and it would consist of rocks, sea, sky, shells and the flotsam I've come across on the beach.

I've been doing a bit of planning for my photographic trip to Tasmania in February over the last few days including looking at Tasmanian photographers. One is Troy Ruffels and his exploration of landscapes in flux series.

One problem I've come across is that there is limited access to broadband whilst travelling in Tasmania. Tasmania is the most disconnected state in Australia and though Tasmania is not a small market, it's a market that has been neglected on many digital fronts for many years. That is why Tasmania is the starting point for building the national broadband network.

It is more or less summer festival time in Adelaide, South Australia. It is ‘Bakhtinian’ party time for Adelaide audiences. All the various festivals--The Fringe, the traditional Arts Festival, and Womadelaide --- are now rolled into one big festival season.

The festival as a platform for presenting culture creates the image of, and repositions, Adelaide as a "creative" city with many voices.

In truth, Adelaide is just part of the global festival circuit and the creative economy. Many of the high art shows, are sourced from the summer festivals in Europe. The Fringe is different as its roots lie in the tradition of the European carnivals of popular culture.

In the Civil Contract of Photography Ariella Azoulay says that in the 1970s when she began writing about art she was drawn to photography and that she was looking for a way to put photographs into words.

However, Azoulay says that in the 1970's there was very little writing on photography within the discourse of art:

Artistic discourse turned out to be an obstacle to seeing what was in the photograph, but it was not the only one. Postmodern theorists –– such as Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, or Susan Sontag –– who bore witness to a glut of images were the first to fall prey to a kind of “image fatigue”; they simply stopped looking. The world filled up with images of horrors, and they loudly proclaimed that viewers’ eyes had grown unseeing, proceeding to unburden themselves of the responsibility to hold onto the elementary gesture of looking at what is presented to one’s gaze.

I saw John Hillcoat's Nick Cave-scripted The Proposition ( 2005) over the Xmas break. It was shot in the central-west Queensland town of Winton and is a graphic representation of the brutal 19th-century Australian outback of the 1880's. Its nihilistic and intensely brutal narrative mocks the conservative or pioneer version of Australian history. In the violent foundation of Australia as a nation men live and die by the gun, and justice comes at the end of a hangman's rope.

Though it references the western and Sergio Leone, The Proposition, as an Australian western, is a grim brutal treatment of the clash between the British Empire and Aboriginals and bushrangers. The landscape shapes the people who live here more than they can ever affect it. It takes western themes—outlaws, isolation, taming the landscape, civilization and progress and transposed them into a thoroughly researched, unique Australian vision.

I haven't seen the earlier Ghosts ... of the Civil Dead about a maximum security "containment facility" located in the middle of a desert, or To Have and To Hold, nor the recent post-apocalyptic The Road.

Late afternoon at Port Elliot on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula was windy, with a strong south westerly wind blowing into the beach, stirring up the sand. The rain had been and gone.

Whilst taking the poodles for a walk along Boomer Beach around 6pm I looked for shots that would be suitable to take with my old 5x4 Linhof. I took a number of shots with my prosumer Sony R1 digital camera of rocks, grass and beach houses that were similar to this one:

Port Elliot, originally uploaded by poodly.

As an abstraction---- a simplification, a reduction, made in the service of some particular interest in my visual diary (Flickr), this is a sketch for a future large format photograph. The image works well enough for me to return with the 5x4 Linhof next weekend. This is an easy way for me to get back into large format photography before I go to Tasmania in early February.

In an earlier post from the time when I was at Victor Harbor over Xmas I said that:

I even managed to do a little thinking about photography----specifically about Saul Leiter's use of colour as form in photography when I was briefly exploring the possibilities for abstraction in the rock forms along the shoreline.

In his Introduction to William Eggleston's Guide in 1976 John Szarkowski says:

In the past decade a number of photographers have begun to work in color in a more confident, more natural, and yet more ambitious spirit, working not as though color were a separate issue, a problem to be solved in isolation (not thinking of color as photographers seventy years ago thought of composition), but rather as though the world itself existed in color, as though the blue and the sky were one thing. The best of Eliot Porter's landscapes, like the best of the color street pictures of Helen Levitt, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore, and others, accept color as existential and descriptive; these pictures are not photographs of color, any more than they are photographs of shapes, textures, objects, symbols, or events, but rather photographs of experience, as it has been ordered and clarified within the structures imposed by the camera.

We are back down at Victor Harbor for the weekend for the first time since the Xmas break. We drive down after Suzanne finished work. Upon reaching Victor Harbor Suzanne went off to the Woolworths supermarket for some juice and yoghurt for tomorrow's breakfast and I walked the dogs along the town beach.

The town centre was jumping with holiday makers eating outside in the restaurants, drinking regional wines and enjoying the cool summer night. A cool change is expected on the weekend. The billboards coming into the town are all about lifestyle---both tourism and seachange. Not everybody is off to Bali apparently.

As I waited for Suzanne to pick me up I watched people cruising the art show and fairground. I couldn't help thinking that the Fleurieu Peninsula as a wine region is facing the consequences of the current wine glut of bargain basement wines that are in opposition to the imported New Zealand sauvignon blancs. It's boom and bust all over again in the Australian wine industry.

I am continually surprised by the attempts of both the politicians in Canberra and Victoria and the police in Australia to downplay the racism in Melbourne's western suburbs that is expressed in the violent attacks against Indian students. All sorts of convolutions are involved, including pointing to the finger to Indian media, in the attempt to avoid the obvious---the curry bashing.

The obvious is that racism in Australia is pervasive, part of the fabric of everyday life and normalised in ways that render it invisible, and make it one of the strongest forms of structural violence. This is what is being denied by the Brumby Government in Victoria, with its talk about random violence and opportunistic crimes, and its unwillingness to set up an agency that is responsible for international student safety.

Behind the deceptive casualness of William Eggleston's Lecia style snapshots of fragments of reality that might otherwise go unregarded lies an acute and instinctive sense of colour and form that is grounded in a modernist aesthetic. 


Though Eggleston didn't invent colour photography he put it on the cultural map with his work in the late 1960s and early 1970s. William Eggleston's Guide His 1976 exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art--- William Eggleston's Guide ---has become a significant event; a milestone. Black and white were deemed to be the colors of photography.

I was down at one of Adelaide's city beach on Sunday night seeking relief from the current heatwave with my cameras. The beach is difficult to photograph and not just because of the formal problems of the horizon cutting the photograph in two. People are suspicious of cameras and they do not want to be photographed.

The suspicion has to do with voyeurism and pedophilia. Childhood has become a much more fraught subject, children's sexuality almost taboo and the gaze of the pedophile becomes the standard by which childhood bodies are increasingly viewed.

So you cannot just wander around the beach taking photos of bodies at play as if the beach was equivalent to the urban streets. A different strategy is called for, say one of looking at the beach from a distance.