Ferit Kuyas has been working on for some time on the city of Chongqing in China. The city is located in Southwest China’s region of Sichuan and was the capital of China during World War II. The municipality is populated by approximately 32 million people and is a Chinese mega-metropolis. Chongqing is the largest agglomeration in the world. What is taking place there resembles the ongoings of Manhattan in the 1920's --when Manhattan was built.

The ever present haze in Chongqing, the Chinese “City of Fog,” is not the product of fragrant rivers, but of the poisonous industrial smog that constantly darkens the sky. This is the Coketown of the early 21st century. According to the World Bank, 16 of the planet's 20 dirtiest cities are in China, and Chongqing's choking atmosphere makes it one of the most polluted.

My River Murray project can be understood as an aesthetic of catastrophe- tradition. Though this process is happening over a longer time frame, than say Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, what is happening in the lower lakes and the Coorong is a catastrophe:

"wet" lands, originally uploaded by poodly.

How does a photographer represent a catastrophe after the failure of culture to prevent the catastrophe? Referring to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans Aric Mayer says:

Across the media landscape, the means of visually depicting the storm break down into two basic aesthetic positions. One is the traditional documentary realism, which works to focus on the humanitarian issues to evoke a kind of empathy in the viewer by depicting suffering and deprivation. The other depicts the landscape to point to the scale of the destruction in an effort to generate an experience of the breadth of the event.

The dominant school of the history of photography in Australia is a nationalist historiography that is based on the coherent evolution of photographic artists and an autonomous photography. The classic text is Gael Newton's 1980s Silver and Grey: Fifty Years of Australian Photography 1900 - 1950.

Newton's modernist text is a national history of good art photographs that counters the Eurocentric mode of historiography of Beaumont Newhall, which concentrated on Germany, France, Great Britain and the US. Australia was, and is, on the fringes on this modernist discourse and Silver and Grey is a kind of repressed or disenfranchised discourse that seeks to become incorporated into the "universal" modernist narrative of art photography.

This Newhall school --as it is known--- is a decontextualized history that concentrates on the artistic quality of the photographers. It represented a shift in the historical photographic object from technical developments to the autonomous images themselves that were produced by a canon of photographers considered as artists. All the rest is sociology. The judgement as to which photographers were considered to be artists was done by the historian.

How can there be a coherent evolution --eg., from Pictorialism to Modernism--when a large number of artist photographer have consciously adopted the blur or focusschmocus as a contemporary form of photographic aesthetic?

I've taken a lot more interest in Michael Jackson's musical videos than either his music or dancing. He made made the look of pop as important as the sound. The Jackson-Landis Thriller (1983) collaboration combined a hit song with dance choreography, all within the framework of a combined werewolf and zombie horror story. The makeup effects of Rick Baker, and the “rap” of Vincent Price were added to the mix and the result became a pop culture event. Jackson has left a rich music video legacy.

But he was known as a song and dance man, and for the quality of his pop songs and his moonwalk dancing, before his work became saccharine and kitsch and became a well-known exhibit in the celebrity zoo. "Billie Jean" is a well-crafted pop song from the classic Thriller album in 1982. It was the first video by a black artist to be aired on MTV:

His music is seen as a significant event in pop music in the 1980s. Jackson, however, was never just about the good pop music or disco and r&b or being a fallen, narcissistic Peter Pan idol. He was also "King of Pop" (self-proclaimed) because of his street dancing.

Michael Jackson, who emerged from the Motown soul sound, may be dead but he is resurrected by the media. He is now everywhere, just like the 1980s when he was singing and dancing--- the time of the disco Off the Wall (1979) and Thriller (1982) and the subsequent television appearances and live tours. This is celebrity culture and a media circus has surrounded Jackson in our commodity-mediascape.

As Paul Morley says in The Observer:

death had allowed the myth of Jackson to surge into life, and his career got the focused injection of publicity he had recently been unable to generate consistently without dangerous self-sacrifice. The 24-hour news channels couldn't believe their luck, all this archive, tension, scandal, revelation, mourning, scorning and gossip. Jackson played a massive, needy part in shaping an entertainment universe which now largely consists of constant gossip about the antics and eccentricities of damaged celebrities, and his death was confirmation that the presentation of round-the-clock news certainly when it comes to popular culture is little more than formally presented, gravely delivered, hastily assembled tittle tattle.

This picture is part of the River Murray project. It's truth content refers to the bad agricultural practices of stripping the land of trees, which in turn, causes the salty underground water to rise to the surface.The clay pan is a salt pan.

claypan, originally uploaded by poodly.

This picture throws off the cosmetics of the beautiful, which from the perspective of an idealist aesthetics, is an ideological and sentimental representation of nature as in itself free from the scars of damage and disruption inflicted by the force and violence of technological mastery over nature.

The Snowy Mountain Hydro Scheme, which provided water for irrigated agriculture and Adelaide as well as power for Sydney, was an example par excellence of the technological mastery over nature in Australia.

The song below is from Hokey Pokey, the followup to Richard and Linda Thompson's classic 1974 debut, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight.

"Hokey Pokey (The Ice Cream Song)" is upbeat and playful piece, and as its riff refers back to Chuck Berry, it is more on the rock side of the folk and rock amalgam. Hokey Pokey the album was made before the Thompson's self-imposed three-year retirement in order to join a communal Sufi Muslim sect. What I enjoy about these earlier albums are the use of horns, accordion, and ancient instruments.

Friday morning humour---a Leunig cartoon:

The homeless are now a permanent part of the Adelaide CBD--especially the Adelaide parklands as this provides a space for them, especially Aboriginal people, to pitch a temporary camp until they can access emergency housing. Often a small tent city becomes established--the latest was near the Victoria Park racecourse--- and there is often an itinerant community in the West Parklands.

If homelessness has been increasing over time in Australia, it is also a serious population health in that the extremely poor health experienced by homeless people represents the severe end of the spectrum of poor health from inadequate housing and health hardware.

A different side of Adelaide. This rustbelt capital city in a state experiencing the decline in manufacturing, has a string of beach suburbs on its western aspect. These show a different and more attractive face of Adelaide:

Seacliff Beach, originally uploaded by poodly.

Normally the light is far too bright for me to photograph along the beach suburbs during the summer months along the beach suburbs. The palm tree helped.

The Battles around Images: Iconoclasm and Beyond issue of Image and Narrative explores the different strands of the image/text relationship.

W.J.T. Mitchell, in this interview in the issue, distinguishes between postmodernism and the pictorial turn. Of the former he says that postmodernism has always struck him as a temporary place-holder, one that served important polemical and critical purposes in the 1970s and 80s, but has now itself been consigned to a relatively brief historical moment. This moment is being replaced by the return to the picture. Of the pictorial turn he says:

The notion that we live in a culture dominated by images, by spectacle, surveillance, and visual display, is so utterly commonplace that I am sometimes astonished at the way people announce it as if they had just discovered it. My aim has been to subject this commonplace to critical and historical analysis, to question whether and where and to what extent it is true, and what it means...To some extent I think of the "mass" version of the pictorial turn as a perennial and recurrent phenomenon, the turn as a cultural "trope" that recurs whenever a new image technology, a new medium, or new apparatus of spectacularization or surveillance comes along. Thus, the invention of artificial perspective, or alphabetic writing, or moveable type, or photography are accompanied by a sense that a "pictorial turn" is occurring, one which is often seen as threatening traditional modes of knowledge and behavior-or (more characteristically within modernism) threatening an atavistic return to tribalism, irrationality, superstition, illiteracy-the entire repertoire of stereotypes associated with idolatry and (let's not leave out) ideological mystification.

Bit by bit the evidence indicates that the southern region of the Murray-Darling Basin is undergoing a significant drying event.

There is increasing evidence that a real shift in weather patterns has occurred over south-eastern Australia that is causing a generally warmer and dryer environment.This drying is expressed in less rainfall, less run-off, less river flows and now evidence of less water replenishing the groundwater systems.

With the consistent reduction in the amount of rainfall over the Murray-Darling Basin since 2001 we have seen reduced run-off from the catchment areas into the dams, reduced flows in the rivers and streams, drying out of the floodplains and wetlands and of course reduced amounts of water being used for irrigation.

I watched a DVD of a tribute to Leonard Cohen entitled I'm your Man. The movie, produced by Hal Willner, was based on a January 2005 tribute show at the Sydney Opera House titled "Came So Far for Beauty".

I didn't enjoy the interpretations of Cohen's songbook apart from Martha Wainwright's "The Traitor" and "Suzanne" by Nick Cave, Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen. Another high note was the performance by Leonard Cohen and U2 of "Tower of Song" at the end of the movie. This was filmed specifically for the movie, in New York in May 2005. It highlights that Cohen, in spite of his technical vocal limitations, is as gifted a performer as he is a songwriter.

I missed Cohen on his recent visit to Australia. But I found this excerpt from Leonard Cohen's Live in London Concert, which was recorded live on July 17, 2008 at London's O2 Arena:

The Canadian singer had returned from a Buddhist monastery to discover that his business manager had stolen his retirement money. The two-disc set recorded live at London's O2 Arena was part of the tour to help rebuild his retirement.

In the Introduction to Photography Crisis of History the editor Joan Fontcuberta writes that photography arrived at the year 2000 beset by an apparent crisis of identity:

The vertiginous technological changes all around us, together with the political and economic context that underpins these, have transformed the genesis and the nature of the photographic image to such an extent as to legitimate every uncertainty as to its current status....The whole ethical and aesthetic basis has been subverted.The landscape is decidedly unrecognizable, so unrecognizable that some, the most radical are now speaking of the death of photography, whole others, more moderate, introduce a new and necessary ambiguous category: that of post-photography.

I have to admit being initially puzzled by this kind of commentary since I found that the shift to digital makes it easier and cheaper to do photography. Digital technology is liberating in that it opens up spaces that enable a public presence to work that was never there in a pre-digital world --eg., photoblogs, e-books and magazines, digital exhibitions etc.