July 16, 2003
interesting photographs
This is a very interesting online photographic magazine. The latest issue of 28m has a series of photographs by different photographers. Each of the indvidual series are all worth exploring.
In reading them I can see that the world wide web has given photography a new lease of life. The internet means that it is no longer necessary to work away towards a gallery exhibition or a book. Though I spent a lot of time doing photgraphy in the early 1980s when I had a studio, the traditional trajectory of an artist career was what stopped me from taking photographs. I stopped for most of the time that I was teaching and writing philosophy in the academy.
I stopped for two reasons. I could never get the work together for an exhibition. Secondly, I had to earning a living and I did not want to do so by being a commercial photographer, or working in a factory as I and bought an inner city cottage. So I became an academic. The photography was reduced and eventually it stopped. What was the point of photography? I was on an academic track. So I gave up the studio, I stopped taking the black and white urbanscapes with the 5x7 view camera, and eventually put the old Lecia in a drawer.
I started up photography again when I wanted some pictures on the bare walls of the electronic inner city cottage and to replace all the rustic gum trees at the beach shack in Victor Harbor. I shifted over to colour and landscape and started exploring the SA region. But, as I found film all very expensive I didn't produce that much:----what I could do on my holidays or on the odd weekend when at Victor Harbour.
But I had done enough over the last couple of years for me start to think about working in 5x4 sheet film for the landscapes with my old Linhof. However, I had reached a bit of a dead end as what would I do with the photos. You can only enframe so many photos for the walls of the house.
When I looked at the work in 28mm and read about the photographers new possibilities opened up. I can see that it is now possible to regularly publish the images on a weblog with a scanner, or more ambitiously to use the scanner to build a virtual gallery attached to a weblog. No need for an exhibition in an art gallery or a book.
An excellent example of what can be done is provided by Kurt Easterwood's hmmn: musings from the far east(erwood). It provides a model of what junk for code can aspire to over time.
So I've decided to buy a flatbed scanner this week. In the short term I will scan snaps such as this:
This is Agtet, one of our two standard poodles. The location is between the towns of Woomera and Andamooka. It was taken with a Leica M4p on a trip in 2001. The image is called Xmas Greetings as I had used it for Xmas cards in 2001.
That particular desert trip included a weeks holiday in the opal mining town of Andamooka, which is just north east of Roxby Downs. It was there that I started taking landscape photos again. I eased my way back into photography after a decade with my old 6x6 twin lens Rolleiflex.
A scanner would give me reason to print more of photos that I taken since then 1991. Scanning them into the weblog and organizing them into some sort of gallery is much better than having the contact sheets and negatives sitting in a filing cabinet. That was the dead end I got into---it is what is happening at the moment. That had saddens me as I enjoy photography. But I felt trapped and frustrated.
Until I saw the 28m work online. But making the aspirations reality will take time as I do not have the technical knowledge to set up a galleryon the weblog. I'm a digital luddite.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at July 16, 2003 02:43 PM | TrackBack