Amy Pfitzner, an Adelaide based photographer, explores the disconnect in and around identity and culture in her series Identifying Culture at Tandanya--National Aboriginal Cultural Institute.

Identifying Culture brings together three discrete series of artworks ----Family Culture, Wood-Air-Bathing and Indigenous Ties--- that question a person’s identity and cultural history; in this case an identity that is slightly obscured, or hidden behind a new urban or ‘white indigenous’ perspective of place and culture.

The Recent Auckland Photography exhibition is part of the Auckland Festival of Photography. It features 12 photographic artists; a number of New Zealand’s most renowned, alongside those who are mid-career or emerging.

It contains a range of works from the past 15 years, with the emphasis on the recent, and includes important early work, rarely exhibited works, and new, previously unseen works. The show and bookwork features twelve photographers each with a connection to the Auckland region, with the book being an extension of the exhibition with further background, more works, and texts on each artist.

In the catalogue each artist has a full page of text followed by representative examples of their work, while an introductory essay establishes the case for looking beyond the more easily recognisable aspects of subject matter to the different effects and feelings of the images themselves.

This photo of a detail of a landscape by Judith Crispin is an example of Australian Romanticism that has re- surged after modernism came to an end. The gloomy bush looks haunting rather haunted. It is the darkness, the ominous darkness lying behind it, the rocks and tree and the low light of the picture that contributes to this haunting.

The shift away from objective form enables individual subjectivity to be introduced into the landscape. The haunting then refers to individual experience within this kind of landscape. This, in turn, expresses the tension between familiarity and un-familiarity.

'Ness' is the Scottish word for lake. Or it is the Germanic word for promontory in Northern Europe. A promontory is a prominent mass of land that overlooks lower-lying land or a body of water --eg., a lake or seashore. In this case it may also be called a peninsula or headland. Most promontories either are formed from a hard ridge of rock that has resisted the erosive forces that have removed the softer rock to the sides of it, or are the high ground that remains between two river valleys where they form a confluence.

The people behind the Ballarat International Foto Biennale have just produced One Thousand Words [about Photography], which is a journal of critical essays and reviews on photography. It is good to see.

In Issue One Judith Crispin in her essay, A Reflection on Photography, which originally appeared in the 2011 Ballarat International Foto Biennale Core Program Catalogue, questions photography's historical identification with art that reflects or represents reality. She concludes thus:

If we accept the idea that nature is unknowable photography can no longer be evaluated according to the principles of mimesis and must therefore be evaluated by the same criteria as other fine arts.

Judith Crispin, who one of the photographers in the core programme of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale 2011, has a public persona or artistic identity as Hsien -Ku. She is a composer as well as a photographer.

This picture appears to be connected to the Märchen (fairytales) project, which was exhibited in February 2012 at the Brunswick Street Gallery in Melbourne.

This body of work consists of hybrid artworks comprised of digital and analog photographs, digital and hand painting, and original poems. The series combines images from Teutonic fairytales with poetry inspired by the cold-war experiences of Irene, an 80 year old Berlin woman, who was Crispin's neighbour when she lived and worked in Berlin, Germany.

I have started to explore the Library of Congress' important collection of Civil War photographs and the work of George N Barnard

Barnard was summoned to Atlanta, Georgia, in September 1864, immediately after Union forces, commanded by General William T. Sherman, captured the city. Barnard was the official photographer of the Chief Engineer's Office. Much of what he photographed was destroyed in the fire that spread from the military facilities blown up at Sherman's departure from Atlanta.

The Neo-Expressionists who had their origins in the New York art scene and hyped art market of the 1980s, were scavengers plundering from a variety of styles and sources including graffiti art, graphic design handbooks, magazines, and the literary and art historical canon.

An example is Jean-Michel Basquiat. He began as a graffiti artist in New York City in the late 1970s and evolved into an acclaimed Neo-expressionist and Primitivist painter by the 1980s. He lived fast and died young.--Within a period of five years he went from being a high school drop-out living on the streets of New York, to an established painter whose work was in high demand. Shortly thereafter, he died of a drug overdose at the age of twenty-seven, ending his short, but prolific career.

La Hara is Puerto Rican slang for ‘the police’. In this painting. Basquiat depicts the policeman with a disproportionately large chest, his figure filling most of the frame, and with red eyes, representing him as an overpowering, irrational force. However, his puffed chest is also hollow, and the figure lacks limbs, confining his mobility, an idea reinforced by his position behind a fence, painted in the lower left.

After five years of photographing the manifestations of energy production and consumption across the United States Mitch Epstein has been photographing trees around New York City using an 8-by-10 field camera and black-and-white sheet film.

The resulting photographs invert people’s usual view of their city: trees no longer function as background or landscape, but, instead, become the focus of the image, dominating the human life and architecture around them. He refers to the pitfalls of the picturesque by which he means that he didn’t want the color to be a distraction to what was intrinsic to the picture:

I realized there was a lot about the contemporary urban landscape that was colored that was going to become a distraction. Whether it was the yellow streetlights, the cross lights at the intersections, or the color of the red fire hydrant. There was also the potential to fall prey to the sameness of the color, especially in the summer season, when yes, there are varieties of green but the green is what is prevailing. Somehow black and white doesn’t prevail as a palette the same way color does.

Neil Pardington, who will exhibit a series on scientific collections in museums at the Auckland Festival of Photography, has a brief series on meat abattoirs.

I would have thought that this was one of those inaccessible and ‘forbidden’ spaces:

Since Pardington photographed only on Sundays so the abattoir is devoid of people, carcasses and movement. The above image is of the place of electrocution-- it shows a form of mechanized death. A stainless steel environment that is part of f working in a series – the idea of returning to a similar subject over and over again.