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July 19, 2004
In this post I mentioned the idea of photographic modernism questioning the hegemonic visual regime that is based on the transparency of language.
That visual regime was premised around light, transparency, homogenizing sameness and the objectifying gaze of the observing (humanist) spectator that saw the landscape as resources.
I suggested that Australian photographic modernism's emphasis on beauty, form and the celebration of the industrial machine did not put this visual regime into question.
Wolfgang Sievers,
ACI Engineering, Burwood, Victoria, 1981.
There is no disruptive power to the images of this Fordist modernism based on a naive representationalism. This is the dominant visual regime or the given visual order premised on the neutral eye:
Wolfgang Sievers, Bruck Mills, Wangaratta, Victoria, 1950.
The camera was the eye's technological extension and fostered the Cartesian visual regime with its emphasis on obviousness.
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