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June 5, 2008
When I was in Melbourne last weekend doing a bit of photography I decided to explore those Melbourne photographers who also have websites, weblogs or photoblogs. Since Melbourne has a very active photographic community I was interested in seeing how they were developing their digital presence in the form of creative culture.
This work---and I'm thinking of what is called art photography here---is Flickr based, and unlike the German work, uses 35m and medium format rather than the view camera. I'm not sure to what extent the Melbourne Flickr photographers are a part of the art gallery scene, or stand outside it. Since I unaware of any magazines that discuss what is happening photographically in Melbourne in terms of art criticism that I can turn to for a map, I decided to adopt a bootstrap approach.
One photographer that I came across, and whose work I often turn to in order to improve my own photography, goes by the name of ziz on Flickr. Ziz is Chris Zissiadis, and his photoblog is entitled urbanlight, which is very active. Alas, as there are few images in the public domain on the internet, we have to mostly work in terms of exploring the links.
The work is mostly black and white with some colour, it is often in a square format, urban based and film based. The city's pulse, signs and form is explored by someone who spends a lot of time in the city and knows its rhythms, light and moods well:
 It is very much people in an urban life, whose architecture and forms shape their flow or movement. The modernist forms are those of the contemporary Melbourne CBD --the laneways, the small streets and the walkways and the buildings around them.
For instance, this recent black and white photo
 is a spare, classically modernist celebration of industrial form that refers back to both the early American modernists ---Paul Stand and Charles Sheeler ---and the modernist work in Australia of Max Dupain.
In the Australian context both Dupain and the older Harold Cazneaux fully embraced the modern in photography, shifting from pictorialism (defined as a romantic approach with its roots in impressionism) to one aligned with the New Photography or New Objectivity emanating from Europe, and in particular Germany, in the 1920s and 1930s. This was photography concerned less with representation and more with formal relationship and composition
In Chris's work people are moving through the urban spaces and they are, more often than not, blurred shapes overwhelmed by the looming or dominating architecture. What is being produced is the development of an Australian modernism that looks back to, and builds on, Strand's Wall Street:
Paul Strand, Wall Street, 1915, gelatin silver print
It is an Australian modernism that focuses less on Charles Sheeler's industrial forms of the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge Plant, or Dupain's representations of Harry Seidler's architecture and more on the forms of Melbourne's freeways as a sign of industrial modernity. Whereas Dupain's modernism celebrated a modern industrial Australia as a form of utopia, Zissiadis is more discordant and dialectical. So we have a tension between the cool, often abstract surfaces of modern Melbourne and the discordent alternate or underworld that flickers at night. Modernism jars.
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ziz and me took up photography approximately at the same time a few years back. Since then he has not only overtaken me but has run rings around me. He's a total inspiration to me.