Junk for Code

New Zealand Photography: Haruhiko Sameshima

I've become a paid-up member of Photoforum New Zealand --they have an excellent blog by the way. Consequently, I'm now receiving printed material in the mail.

The latest is a book entitled Bold Centuries by Haruhiko Sameshima, which arrived just after I'd got back from Broken Hill. The book is an eye opener and a cultural shock. This is sophisticated work as it links photographic practice and photographic criticism.

Sameshima is a Japanese living in New Zealand. He is not featured on Photoforum's members page, even though he is a central figure in contemporary New Zealand photography.

Haruhiko Sameshima, Kauri Kingdom, date unknown, silver gelatin print

Sameshima worked in a small Dunedin photographic studio learning the craft before attending Otago Polytechnic Art School, then completing aBFA and MFA at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 1995. He is currently teaching as half- time lecturer at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland and maintains a studio practice in Karangahape Road.

Bold Centuries is a broad overview of Sameshima's photographic practise and his attempt at placing photographs in an open narrative located within a story of New Zealand photography and our consumption of New Zealand's visual culture. It is a very complex book.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Alatyite Dreaming

When I was in Broken Hill I visited the regional art gallery where I saw a couple of works by Emily Kame Kngwarreye. I cannot recall their titles, but they were similar in style and colour to this one:

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Alatyite Dreaming, 1994, Acrylic On Canvas

Emily Kame Kngwarreye's work resonated more than the others in the gallery. I kept on coming back to look at the subtle pastel colours of the two works in the collection. These were so different to the style of the last series of paintings and I found them very moving.

previous posts are here and here

the Big Empty

The Silver City Highway in New South Wales runs from Wentworth, which is on the Murray and Darling Rivers junction, to the mining city of Broken Hill. This space or landscape is a part of what Elizabeth Farrelly calls the Big Empty.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, on the Silver City Highway, near Broken Hill, 2009

The Big Empty refers to the dead heart or the dead centre of Australia. Farrelly says about her trip from Sydney to Lake Eyre, which she entitles "Mile after mile of big fat nothing", that:

Lake Eyre might have been the reason for the trip but really, I’m there for the dry. I like the Empty. In fact I love it. So intense – so present – is the absence I photograph it compulsively. Five hundred frames of nothing. .. And though I’ve never really bought the spiritual side of desert, we find ourselves arguing around the campfire about the delphic ‘‘know thyself’’ and what, if anything, it’s worth. (Personally I oppose introspection, not least on aesthetic grounds.) Only later do I remember that deserts and mystics go together like flies and doo-doo.

I also love the Big Empty even when it is awfully dry. Only I see my photos as representations of something as opposed to "frames of nothing."

What we see as the absence or the nothing is a stripped landscape that has been created by a pastoral capitalism created in the nineteenth century. The trees and biodiversity were there once. The sheep and goats--which is what I saw asI passed through the region --- eat everything----including the new shoots. The land is not cared for in that there is no replanting to protect the ecology of the landscape. Landcare is what is absent in this region.

Use and abuse for profit s the name of the game . That view is mocked as the black armband of history as being too “negative” by the conservative's national narrative of Australia's past as one of achievement and progress based on the heroic achievement of dead white males who laid the foundations of the prosperous liberal democracy of Australia.”

Grateful Dead: Fire on the Mountain

Grateful Dead, Fire on the Mountain, Live at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, NJ April 27th, 1977. It was commercially released on the album Shakedown Street in November of 1978.

The album was not well received by critics. However, some songs, including this one, are classic.

sorry old world

And so we have a somewhat sardonic representation of what four decades of human 'progress' here on planet Earth means:

Martin Rowson

'Tis time to dump the word 'progress' me thinks. It now stands for a heap of ruins---caused by the pursuit of economic growth as an end in itself, or for its own sake.

I appreciate that the utilitarians often say that the end of progress is happiness, but they more often than not reduce happiness to prosperity or wealth creation in practice. Their principle of the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people more or less greater income. It is better not to be poor or suffer from poverty.

So mining at Broken Hill by BHP is good because the benefits of wealth outweigh the harms of mining deaths, diseases caused by dust, and blighted urban landscapes. Australia, according to the reasoning of neoclassical economists, has a comparative advantage, relative to the nations of east Asia, in hosting materials-processing industries that generate damaging environmental wastes.

Consequently, Broken Hill has been, and still is, a town dominated by the mining industry that has taken the city from boom time to bust. Today, it is bust.

The mineral resources in the Broken Hill area have dwindled, the city is experiencing a swiftly shrinking population, it has an ageing population and the city’s many pubs continue to close down. Tourism has become increasingly important to the city's economy. Since less than 700 work in the mining industry, the city is reinventing itself as a heritage city and as an artistic centre.

River Murray: some flows in Mildura

The city of Mildura, Victoria sells itself as the Mediterranean on the Murray, and, unlike the depressed Riverland region in South Australia, it has the appearance of there being a limited crisis of the river.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, house boat, River Murray, Mildura, 2009

The dogs and I walked along the Murray River early this morning in Mildura and I noticed that there was water flowing over weir number 11. And it was still flowing over Lock 10 at Wentworth, where the Darling and the Murray join, when I was there latter in the day on our way to Broken Hill via the Silver City highway.

Sunraysia growers are responding to the drought by continuing to reduce the area of crops watered. Who cares if the river has stopped flowing at the mouth of the River Murray? South Australia is another state.

The purpose of weirs 1 to 10 (from Blanchetown to Wentworth) and the associated locks is to provide:

(1) permanent navigation between the Murray Mouth and Wentworth for the large number of houseboats, tourist cruise boats and other recreational craft.
(2) relatively constant pool level to facilitate pumping for irrigation and water supply.

There is nothing about ecological health in this. So it is no suprise that no water is reaching the lower lakes of Alexandrina and Albert. Where has the flowing water gone? Has the water been allocated to the irrigators in Sunraysia and Riverland regions? Where else would it go?

Maria Levitsky: architectural ruins

I find myself deeply attracted to industrial architecture that is photographed with an eye to its history as opposed to just its form. A history that reminds us of an age that has passed. So we have empty buildings as ruins:

Maria Levitsky, Thunderbolt, Coney Island, 2001, Silver Gelatin Print

It was not that many years ago that we would have found it hard to accept that industrial capitalism was a historical period and one that was becoming history. Instead of the ruins of castles we have industrial ruins.

Levitsky says:

At times, inside these abandoned buildings whose stories I don't know, I’ve felt compelled to imagine the myriad events that led to the demise of the place and its previous inhabitants. The word palimpsest often comes to mind. It invokes the erased-book feeling conveyed by the empty walls, scribbled with vague marks left on bare surfaces by unknown people. It is this evidence of disappearance that I desire to record in my photographs.

photographic trip to Menindee Lakes

Early tomorrow morning I leave Adelaide city for a short photographic/holiday trip to Broken Hill and hopefully to the Menindee Lakes via Mildura. It is only for several days as I return to Adelaide late Tuesday. Lack of time means that the Menindee Lakes are tentative.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, wall, Melbourne, 2009

Broken Hill is our base from which we explore the region. I do not hold out much hope for access to the internet in Broken Hill, as this regional city is a broadband blackspot with backhaul problems, so my posting may be sparse and dependent on internet cafes. I'll do my best.

The processes in this regional space around the Darling River is regional Australia ---are based on irrigated agriculture along the Darling River and mining at Broken Hill. How do you take a photo that critically expresses the values embodied in humans' relations to the natural environment in an agricultural/mining region of Australia?

This understanding of the river ---as a resource to exploited for regional development by those who resist an ecological science-- is so very different from my eco-philosophy perspective, which mourns a dying River Murray caused by the excesses of irrigated agriculture, celebrates biodiversity and deconstructs the conventional opposition between humans and nature.

Our subjectivity's are so radically different.

Brian Eno: By this River

I watched Brian Eno on ArtScape on ABC Television last night on. Musician, artist and collaborator, curator. I was impressed by the innovation. Eno was recently in Australia as curator of the Luminous Festival at the Sydney Opera House.

I dug around and came across this early music video:

Eno presented 77 million Paintings --a self-generated "visual music"--a constantly evolving sound and imagescape. Another interesting self-generated system is My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

The basic premise of generative music is the blending of several independent musical tracks, of varying sounds, length, and in some cases, silence. When each individual track concludes, it starts again mixing with the other tracks allowing the listener to hear an almost infinite combination

who cares?

We are experiencing a whole week of the media celebrating the Americans walking on the moon 40 years ago--- it is a celebration of science, technology, human will and astronauts as "heroes". This celebration and selling of space exploration has become part of the "adulation of celebrities and inflation of heroism" in American culture.

Moir

All this celebration of Australia's role in the man on the moon mission. Yet we cannot use science, technology and human will to fix the ecology of the Murray-Darling Basin. It has been left to die slowly because there is no national commitment to cut back on the over allocations of water licences for irrigated agriculture. Victoria has even been allowed to take water from the River Murray for Melbourne under the guise of modernizing infrastructure.

everyday life #2

Henri Lefebvre in his The Production of Space makes a critical departure from the neo-Kantian and neo-Cartesian conceptions of space. Focusing on social space, Lefebvre argues that space is not an inert, neutral, and a pre-existing given, but rather, an on-going production of spatial relations. Lefebvre writes:

social space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products: rather, it subsumes things produced and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity—their (relative) order and/or (relative) disorder. (p.73).

Lefebvre objects to the reification of space by rejecting the Cartesian model, separating “ideal space” from “real space.” Instead, space is a product of something that is produced materially while at the same time

“operate[s]…on processes from which is cannot separate itself because it is a product of them”. Thus the slow course of historical (capitalist) development everything in terrestrial space has been explored and nearly everything has been occupied and conquered… the forests, lakes, beaches, mountains have been well-nigh completely ‘appropriated’” by capital.

Urban space has also been historically organized according to the specific requirements of economic institutions and the state:


Gary Sauer-Thompson, Victoria Square, Adelaide, 2009

We find ourselves situated within the city produced by pastoral and then industrial capitalism in the19th and 20th centuries; an urban form of the CBD and the outer suburbs with the habitual or repetitive movement of people to and from the donut centre.

Lefebvre writes:

The world of commodities would have no 'reality' without such [spatial] moorings or points of insertion, or without their existing as an ensemble,The same may be said of banks and banking-networks vis-a-vis the capital market and money transfers." It is only in space that each idea of presumed value "acquires or loses its distinctiveness through confrontation with the other values and ideas that it encounters there"; it is only in space that competing socio-political interests and forces come effectively into play.

On Lefebvre's account without grain elevators, canal boats, lake vessels, railroads and trucks that ship grain to and from them, there could be no grain trade in general, no 'daily bread' as it were. Urban space has been organized according to the specific requirements of economic institutions. Lefebvre writes:

The world of commodities would have no 'reality' without such [spatial] moorings or points of insertion, or without their existing as an ensemble. The same may be said of banks and banking-networks vis-a-vis the capital market and money transfers. It is only in space that each idea of presumed value acquires or loses its distinctiveness through confrontation with the other values and ideas that it encounters there; it is only in space that competing socio-political interests and forces come effectively into play.

Without such spaces, neither the economy nor the State are capable of maintaining, exercising or projecting (their) power. These are neo-liberal spaces with minimal public interaction and they produce a desire for change and its accompanying fear.

We sense both the limits of this neo-liberal urban form and what this corporate space denies and hope for the emergence of something different.

everyday life #1

During the 20th century there were a number of calls for philosophy to return to everyday life in modernity so as to rescue it from its present alienation and, in turn, to save philosophy from irrelevance. The everyday is what philosophy traditionally sought to deny, and this elision of everyday life represents the denial of being human.

What we have inherited is an abstracted mode of philosophy and science (neo-classical economics) that is always located within the world of local and material actualities, but which implicitly disavows this location. and our own embodiment in the details of details of everyday life.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Rundle Mall, Adelaide, 2009

Everyday life, it was argued by Henri Lefebvre in Everyday Life in the Modern World, had become reified by ‘the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’, which requires that philosophy return to everyday life, the intrinsically non-philosophical, from its abstractions and speculations, to sublate theory and practice and open the way for a radical freedom.

Often this proposal for an encounter between philosophy and everyday life that will be mutually transforming is one in which philosophy critiques everyday life; a proposal that fixes a one-way relation between everyday life and a discourse of philosophy, which transcends it. These proposals, eg. those of Heidegger, opt for the enrichment of philosophy over the enrichment of everyday life--ie., the organization and production of social time and space, and the questions associated with culture.

In contrast to continuing to attempt to deny and escape the conditions of humanity and bodily existence, we work to make them visible and to launch our critique from outside of academic disciplinary space. The lacunae of enriching everyday life can be addressed through a photography that both understands that everyday life constitutes the lived experience of the social world, and is linked to the theories of psychogeography, diversion and la derive (the drift) and the commodity-spectacle that lie at the center of the situationist project.

Such a photography and text ----in the form of a self published book---would recover the “concrete” against the abstractions of thought. It would be unfinished, fragmentary, exploratory and have different melodies and tonalities.

photo books: self-publishing

There is a current explosion in the art & photobook market due to the emergence of the internet and the turn to digital photography. This offers all sorts of possibilities for independent photographers.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, leaf, Adelaide, 2009

In this interview at The PhotoBook Darius Himes, the co-founder and editor of Radius Books, says that the new print-on-demand phenomenon has placed the ability to “publish” directly in the hands of photographers. The consequence is that it gets photographers to think outside of the box of photography and to think in relation to the book as a separate entity.

In this post on his blog Hines says referring to book competition by Blurb:

A book, in general, is a very democratic and accessible vehicle to disseminate ideas, in the form of either text or images—two primary advantages are that books require no electricity and can be returned to again and again, unlike an exhibition, for instance, or the Internet.Creating a successful book involves editing and sequencing and design all in light and in line with an overriding concept which has to be determined ahead of time. Asking yourself ahead of time, “Who is this book for?” and “What am I trying to accomplish with this book?” is extremely important.he three categories of this years’ contest—Fine-Art, Editorial and Commercial—are designed to encourage photographers to think about books the way publishers do. Let me restate that: the categories require that photographers think like publishers.

Hines adds that editorial and commercial photographers often serve patrons other than themselves. So, an editorial photographer sent on an assignment to cover X, may find themselves with a much larger, broader, more engaging body of work than will ever get published in a magazine. And they may want to turn that project into a book, and get it out there to a wide audience. Likewise, a commercial shooter ofter has photographic skills that translate into a broadly accessible visual language, and can be used for a “commercial” book project. Publishers often conceive of book projects in-house and then commission commercial photographers to produce work for the book.

River Murray wake

A wake was held at Clayton last weekend marking the death of the River Murray. It was held by the River, Lakes and Coorong Action Group (RLCAG) to protest against the building of the temporary flow regulator (a weir) between Hindmarsh Island and Clayton Bay and two others to raise water levels, limiting the exposure of acid sulphate soils to the air.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, abandoned cottage, Point Malcolm,Lake Alexandrina, 2009

The Clayton Bay weir will have the effect of cutting Lake Alexandrina off from the fresh water flows of the Finness River and Currency Creek. The implication is that parts of the Murray river in South Australia which are dying are being let go to ensure the survival of other parts. The crisis in this region is one where we're now in a situation where the Lower Lakes have been emptied out.

In fact everything has been emptied out. There's nowhere else to go, there's no reserves in the system. If the drought continues, there will almost certainly not be adequate fresh water available to maintain the previous state of the Lakes.

If you don’t let the freshwater down to avoid acidification in the lower lakes, then it’s pretty much inevitable that they’ll have to let the saltwater in. We are prepared to use water to keep crops alive that need to be kept alive, if people are to make a living, and plant new crops, but we are not prepared to spend them on buying water to keep the ecology of the Lower Lakes and the Coorong alive. Labor Governments across the country are prepared to sit back and let the Coorong and lower Lakes die to protect their irrigators.

I'm planning a little trip to Broken Hill next week and I'm going to explore what's been happening in the Darling River and the Menindee Lakes in NSW. I suspect that the Menindee Lakes will be dry and the Darling River a series of pools.

The wake should have happened several years ago when the River Murray stopped flowing to the sea a few years. it was then that the fresh water stopped flowing into the Coorong, and then the river mouth closed up completely, so the salt water couldn't get in either, and the Coorong started to dry up. For several years now, there have been dredges at the Murray Mouth, fighting to keep it open, but they can't seem to keep it wide enought or deep enough for a satisfactory amount of water to enter the Coorong. What salt water makes it into the Coorong Channel (the bit between the Murray Mouth and the Coorong proper) cannot make it all the way into the Coorong before the tide turns, and it all flushes out again.

Independent photography

Independent photography is the name of the game as a result of the digital revolution in photography and the power of the computer as a visual tool both of which change the whole notion of what a photograph could be. Photographers are no longer confined to producing photographs that fit a 19th Century definition of what a photograph is or should be.

The concept of the 'independent photographer' connotes a lone individual following a personal agenda and not obligated to any paymaster took shape during these the 1950s and 1960s. It recalls the private odysseys undertaken by Robert Frank, albeit under a Guggenheim fellowship; or a Diane Arbus, after turning her back on commercial commissions. It is anti-commercial.

This interpretation suggests that photography, as opposed to painting or writing, is different from a freelance writer or photographer as the connotation is more about art than journalism.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Grafitti artist, Adelaide

The reference to the art institution suggests that the concept of 'independent photographer' is to be understood in terms of the exhibiting artist-photographer or photographic artist.

However, this common understanding is too narrow, given both the emergence, and takeup by photographers of the weblog as an online publishing platform, and their use of online galleries to "exhibit" their work.

Ian Fairweather

I know very little about the work of Ian Fairweather, or even much about him and his life. I knew the bare skeleton--that he was a nomad living on the margins of civilisation and that his work in the late 1950's and early 60's (eg., Monastery in 1961; Monsoon, Shalimar and Epiphany in 1961-62; Turtle and Temple Gong in 1965) is recognized as making him one of Australia's top modernist abstract painters.

I saw this work in the Queensland Art Gallery and it had little effect on me. I did recognize that Fairweather is unlike any other Australian artist:

Ian Fairweather, Kite flying, 1958

Fairweather's art does not fall within the recognised styles of modernist art ---impressionism, post-impressionism, expressionism and cubism. In some ways the works represent an escape from the confines of modernist art.

I read the blurb, which in part said:

Kite flying is from a group of works painted in late 1958 and exhibited at the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney in November that year. Fairweather’s intention was to get away from melody: 'one can get so terribly tired of melody if one hears it over and over again'. Kite flying has a planned sense of discord with occasional flashes of strong colours like red and blue which agitate and disrupt the surface of the work. The eye does not move rhythmically through the image but darts from point to point, not unlike kites whipped by the wind. The figures in the bottom half of the painting anchor and balance the upper sections, which are full of movement.

What is melody in painting I thought?

depression

We realize now that climate change does have the effect of making us feel powerless, due to our lack of hope that our politicians will do anything by way of mitigation to keep the rise of global temperatures to 2 degrees.

Rudd + Co went soft and buckled at the knees under the lobbying and public relations pressure bought to bear on the government by the Greenhouse mafia. Hence our depression.

Leunig

What isn't being said by the politicians is what adaptation to global heating actually involves and means for us, given they are going to do little by way of mitigation. What we do know is that the politicians, despite all their rhetoric about the importance of climate change, have been captured by the old fossil fuel industry and intensive energy users and pressured to do as little as possible.

So we are depressed, but not yet angry.

surveillance in the city

I've been photographing in Adelaide city and trying to develop some sort of theme about urban life amidst the transformations that are taking place in the urban form and the shift to sustainability. I'm struggling with both working up a theme for the project and how to construct a non-linear narrative.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, supermarket trolley, Adelaide, 2009

It was with interest that I read Cory Doctorow's “Snitchtown” at Forbes.com in 2007 about the proliferation of CCTVs. by the surveillance state. These cameras are increasingly everywhere and yet there are ever more restrictions on us taking photos in the city. This surveillance is justified in the name of fighting the war on terrorism by the surveillance state.

However, there are no terrorists in Adelaide and Australia has been slow to join the conservative's
‘surveillance revolution’. In South Australia it is the law and order politics of the Rann Government (fueled by Murdoch's right -wing tabloid---The Advertiser) ---that sits behind the pressure for increasing surveillance of the street in the neo-liberal city. An extensive CCTV system is necessary to to demonstrate that the city council and state government's are ‘tough on crime’ and stamp down on threats from the enemy within.

Doctorow says that the trick is to contain the creeping cameras of the law. When the city surveils its citizens, it legitimizes our mutual surveillance:

we need to reclaim the right to record our own lives as they proceed. We need to reverse decisions like the one that allowed the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority to line subway platforms with terrorism cameras, but said riders may not take snapshots in the station. We need to win back the right to photograph our human heritage in museums and galleries, and we need to beat back the snitch-cams rent-a-cops use to make our cameras stay in our pockets.

There is a photographic project by Emma Byrne that illustrates Doctorow's "Snitchtown" essay.

So we have the politics of law and order that is designed to hide the consequences of neoliberal rule; consequences such as the effects from welfare cutbacks, privatisation and under investment in various social services. The neoliberal urban spaces are erasing the ‘traces’ of inequality with the construction of new iconic architecture monuments that strategically remove the poor, the dirt and dilapidation of the older industrial city that attract those deemed to be "undesirable."

Lauren E. Simonutti: surrealism

I have a lot of respect for the old school photographer-- that is, the one who understands photography as a mode of expression and who works with large format camera, darkroom, contact prints, black and white film, toned prints and handcrafted books. This kind of analogue work is not for me.

A wonderful example is the Baltimore photographer Lauren E. Simonutti, also known as lauren.rabbit on Fickr. Her work references the surrealist stand of Hans Bellmer and Georges Bataille that explores 'the uncanny' or events ‘in which repressed material returns in ways that disrupt unitary identity, aesthetic norms and social order’:

Lauren E. Simonutti, Years End--the eye, 2008, from the series the madness is the method

The Surrealists’ untamed eye is first and foremost an inner eye that disrupts that modernism which celebrated hygiene, purity of line, functionalism and the supreme rationality of the machine. It is a current that sprang from the utterly inexplicable horrors of the trenches and works tin terms of a disrupted narrative in which events do not follow in a linear or logical manner.

The mid to late nineties saw Simonutti become intimately related to the world of medicine including intensive care, orthopedics, physical therapy, wheelchairs (primarily single arm propelled), adjustable dial leg braces, bone growth stimulation , titanium steel insertion rods and repeated reconstructive surgery, as the result of her rapid expulsion from the windshield of the car that ran her over as she was walking home on the Lower East Side.

Lauren E. Simonutti, wind 4x for goodbye, 2008, from the series the madness is the method

Recently returned from the dead Simonutti is in the process of piecing things and her life together. Throughout it all, events, injuries, individuals, dreams, nightmares, life, still life and visions of afterlife have been faithfully recorded, processed, printed and when necessary toned, painted or otherwise altered.

Currently Lauren is engaged in a battle with her fractured mind within wreck of a house in Baltimore which has become her primary model and largest body of work in progress thus far. The surrealism of this work refers to a concern to create a specific emotional response, one that challenges the viewer to embrace the world of the dream, the abject and the irrational.

If the desire within Breton's surrealism is to liberate the unconscious, to create room for the imagination, to confront the abject, to change the conditions of ordinary mundane reality, then Surrealism's darker side (Bataille) explores sadism and masochism, desire and death.

wilderness photography: its flaws

Wilderness style photography traditionally defines wilderness as a land devoid of human impact, and in Australia this kind of photography does so by mixing the European pictorial codes of naturalism and the picturesque. So we have wilderness photographs that appear to be transparent windows on an unpeopled nature. An example is this picture that looks back from Cape Farewell Spit lookout:

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Golden Bay, Motueka, New Zealand, 2009

This is on the eastern side of Farewell Spit, and it looks across coastal settlements (Collingwood and Takaka) and farmland, as well as Kahurangi National Park.

David Stephenson, who is an Associate Professor at the School of Art, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia, addresses the aesthetic issues raised by wilderness photography in a paper entitled Beautiful Lies: Photography and Wilderness.

He says that wilderness photography raises several philosophical problems. First:

our experience of nature is far more complex and dualistic than these representations suggest in their avoidance of disorder, death and decay, and attendant cycles of change and regeneration. In this popular imagery wilderness is aestheticised in particular ways, through naturalistic pictorial codes largely inherited from the nineteenth century. The goal of the imagery is clearly to represent the subject as transparently (and most importantly as invitingly) as possible, facilitated by adhering rigidly to popular representational conventions. The naturalistic conventions used in recent wilderness photography include virtually exclusive use of colour, sharp rendition of detail, deep focus from foreground to distance, and generally warm chromatic values of pleasant sunny conditions. (The converse — monochrome, soft or limited focus, evidence of camera or subject movement, and inclement weather — that might result in pictures more convergent with the typical visitor experience of wilderness, are very rarely utilised as pictorial strategies.) These pictures seductively draw the eye into and rationally through the representational space, where every detail of nature’s beauty is available for consumption through the viewer’s gaze.

He says that the almost all modern wilderness photographs rely on an obvious lie—there is never any evidence of humanity in the picture. We need to begin to erode some of the largely artificial boundaries we have erected between nature and culture. Secondly, we can draw from postmodern thought regarding the inherently constructed nature of all systems of representation, including photographic naturalism.

Scarfe on Afghanistan

This cartoon by Gerald Scarfe is one of the better cartoon's I've seen on the troubling war in Afghanistan. Most editorial cartoonists in Australia generally avoid it in favour of comment about the political events of the day.

Gerald Scarfe

Scarfe's work is visually strong, and a powerful image that critiques the war in Afghanistan. A visual politics about the strategy of "clear, hold, build" that represents the credo of General David Petraeus's counterinsurgency operations that include Australian troops.

levelling the photography playing field

David Griffin, writing at one of National Geographic's blogs --- Editor's Pick blog (via Burn magazine ) explores how the sudden surge in digital capability is affecting the viability of being a professional "photojournalist" today. Photojournalist is a misnomer since some of the images Griffin uses to make his argument are landscapes.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Lake Alexandrina, 2009, from River Murray project

In the first post Griffin says that the combination of digital capture and digital delivery (via the web) is rapidly eliminating exclusive characteristics which defined what it means to be a professional photojournalist. Simply put, today’s digital advances are leveling the playing field between enthusiast (amateur) and professional.

Griffin says that the:

sudden flood of competent images would not be creating as much of an issue for the pro, if it were not for the web. The wonderful phenomena (and I do think it is a good thing overall) of the interconnected, digital photography community helps erode another defining support of the professional photographer: the once exclusive ability to be published. With the Internet, almost anyone can distribute their work (and even used by the same publications that assign professionals).

What it means to be a contemporary professional photojournalist/ photographer is being challenged and redefined by the levelling of the playing field. So how can a professional photographer maintain an edge?

Griffin's response is consistency. To be a professional photographer:

you need to be able to make more than just one great image—you have to make them all the time. Any publication dedicating resources to the creation of original photography needs to be assured that the photographers on assignment will come back with the goods....If the [National] Geographic was only looking for photographers that only create single images, the playing field of candidates would be very large indeed. But when we seek out a photographer they must prove (before they get an assignment) that they have a consistent vision and a masterful sense of narrative.

So it comes down to producing a good body of work without any mention of the aesthetic.

Lung Liu: Salton sea

Lung Liu is a portrait and documentary photographer based in Montreal, Canada. His project entitled Abandoned is about the Salton Sea in Southern California. This was once a resort destination for the rich and famous, but now it is an ecological disaster, abandoned and neglected.

Lung Liu Dead Palms, Salton Sea, circa 2007

It is fed by agricultural runoff and the highly polluted New River. The sea’s lack of outflow results in increasing salinity and bacterial levels as well as algal blooms that kill all but the hardiest of fish. These dead fish have, in turn, severely affected the area’s massive bird population. The smell of the polution and algal blooms coupled with the dead fish and birds have significantly curtailed the area’s tourism.

Lung Liu Abandoned vehicle in submerged city, Salton Sea, circa 2007

Resources such as fresh water that can help save the sea from further environmental damage are diverted to nearby areas such as Palm Springs. Needless to say, the future of the Salton Sea is bleak.

Lake Eyre

Australia's Lake Eyre is the fifth largest terminal lake in the world, with a drainage basin stretching 1.2 million km sq from the Northern Territory to South Australia. The lake is mainly dry except in the wake of a rare, steady rainy season. This was the case in early 2009, when intense rains fell over northern Australia. A total of 17m megalitres of water flowed into the lake - which has no outlet - soaking into the soil and sustaining grasses.

Lake Eyre, Landsat/NASA

By June 10, when this satellite image was captured, the flow of water had slowed: Lake Eyre was as full as it was going to get in 2009

Adelaide: new urban form

Adelaide is the urban 'canary in the coalmine' for climate change in Australia. As the climate gets hotter, drier and more variable, Adelaide as city will need to modify it's habits and become more radical and smarter. How is this to happen?

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Brecknock Hotel (1851), Adelaide, 2009

The Rann Government released its 30-year plan for greater Adelaide---Planning the Adelaide we want yesterday. This assumes population growth of 560,000 people, aims to overcome the focus on cars by fast-tracking denser living around designated "green transport corridors" (transit-oriented development), limits new development outside the city from 50 per cent now to 30 per cent, creates walkable neighbourhoods, and expands the network of parks and greenways to encourage walking and cycling and to provide more shade to urban areas.

It sounds good doesn't it.

beyond growth

The field of neo-classical economics in Australia has long been dominated by thinkers who unquestioningly accept the capitalist status quo and, accordingly, value the natural world only in terms of how much short-term profit can be generated by its exploitation. That ecological blindness sums up the Murray-Darling Basin does it not? We now live with the consequences.

The ecological blinkers of neoclassical economics, which excludes the planet itself from its vision, are well illustrated by a debate that took place within the World Bank, related by ecological economist Herman Daly, in Beyond Growth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996 pp 5-6).

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Lake Albert, River Murray

As Daly tells the story, in 1992 (when Summers was chief economist of the World Bank and Daly worked for the Bank) the annual World Development Report was to focus on the theme Development and the Environment:

An early draft contained a diagram entitled “The Relationship Between the Economy and the Environment.” It consisted of a square labeled “economy,” with an arrow coming in labeled “inputs” and an arrow going out labeled “outputs”—nothing more. I suggested that the picture failed to show the environment, and that it would be good to have a large box containing the one depicted, to represent the environment. Then the relation between the environment and the economy would be clear—specifically, that the economy is a subsystem of the environment both as a source of raw material inputs and as a “sink” for waste outputs.

One never hears conventional economists talking about the ecological life support of the economy. The economy is free floating with mainstream economists see themselves as engaged in the science of economic growth.

Daley continues:

The next draft included the same diagram and text, but with an unlabeled box drawn around the economy like a picture frame. I commented that the larger box had to be labeled “environment” or else it was merely decorative, and that the text had to explain that the economy is related to the environment as a subsystem within the larger ecosystem and is dependent on it in the ways previously stated. The next draft omitted the diagram altogether

The assumption of endless economic growth, as if this were the purpose of society and the way of meeting human needs, seems naïve at best in the context of the Murray-Darling Basin.

down at Victor Harbor

Last week I spent a few days down at Victor Harbor. The weather was delightful: still, sunny, temperate and lightly overcast. Winters are becoming warmer as a result of the effects of climate change. As a result we were able to spend some time hanging out in delightful places:

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Ari and Agtet, The Bluff, Victor Harbor, 2009

The downside of relaxing at Victor Harbor is the internet : it is a blackspot with backhaul problems, due to Telstra's monopoly, which means that Telstra can effectively set the pricing and control the speed. So the connections are slow and expensive. Most music video streams from YouTube keep on breaking up, Flickr is slow to load, and some reports with pdf files take forever to download.

I read that the Federal government’s recent $250 million backhaul programme named the six areas for “priority rollout” of the national broadband network (NBN) and these include Victor Harbor. The areas are: Emerald and Longreach in Queensland, Geraldton in Western Australia, Darwin in the Northern Territory, Broken Hill in New South Wales, Victor Harbor in South Australia and South West Gippsland in Victoria.

Backhaul refers to moving large aggregate volumes of data between locations and it refers to the connection between major data aggregation points like exchanges and overseas cables. That means cheaper pricing but not increased speed because the connection between the house and the Victor Harbor exchange remains unchanged. That will only change with fibre to the home (FTTH).

Will the extra backhaul cable to Adelaide be underground? Or strung between powerlines? I hope for the former but suspect the latter.

With highspeed broadband starting to be built we can focus on the applications and the services--on what do we use the network for? It is the latter----the digital economy---that is unclear, even though we know that competition will move from the present artificially controlled price model to the kinds of services and applications each operator (ISP) will offer.

The current talk is about:

operators offering the services they want and are prepared to pay for — entertainment, information, business applications, games, movies, music, and services (some government, others commercial) such as health care and education.....But most of the services that will populate the FTTH network and propagate its use have yet to be set up, and many more have yet to be conceived.

Internet television is one possibility that would be welcome as it would open up more spaces beyond the old newspaper media.

Another is the way that local photographers are putting their work online and commenting on it and the conditions of production.

Dennis Wilson: Pacific Ocean Blue

Dennis Wilson's 'Farewell My Friend" is from his 1977 impressionistic solo album Pacific Ocean Blue, which has recently been recently released. It has been out of print for almost 15 years.

This song expresses more raw emotion and feeling than the "angel voices" of the Beach Boys, who descended into a parody of their former selves on their walk down the apple pie road to country fairs and Republican rallies.

Dennis Wilson, the Beach Boys' drummer, was the only member who actually participated in the sun and surf lifestyle the band's music celebrated. Pacific Ocean Blue is his one and only solo album. Legacy's 2CD reissue of Pacific Ocean Blue contains remastered versions of that record, and several previously unreleased bonus tracks. In addition, the second CD contains tracks that were destined to become Bambu.

Wilson's 'River Song'-- “California gospel soul”?--- is also from Pacific Ocean Blue:

The music indicates that Dennis as a talent in his own right outside of the shadow of his brothers and the Beach Boys. Upon its release in 1977, Pacific Ocean Blue surprised everyone by selling a quarter-of-a-million copies in America, better than most Beach Boys albums of the period.

Wilson had begun work on a followup album Bamboo but it remained unfinished, and is one of the lost albums in pop. 'Lost' refers to a record that should have been released, but for whatever reason, wasn’t. In Wilson's case it was Beach Boys obligations and cocaine and alcohol addiction that prevented the completion of this work-in-progress. Homeless, he self-destructed and died from accidental drowning in 1983.

photographic artists

Photography, in its big desire to accepted as an authentic art form by the modernist art institution in the late 20th century, allowed itself to become subsumed into both art history written by modernist art historians as a history of form, and a standard modernist aesthetics based around forms, creativity and artistic vision.

What hasn't really been considered is whether photography changes our understanding of both art and artists. Walter Benjamin, for instance, argued that photography undercut the aura of art. Are photographers identical to artists (eg., creators of original works by painters, sculptors), or does photography change the way we understand the category 'artist'.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, beer barrels, Adelaide CBD

One consideration here is that the photographer's archive is made up of thousands, or tens of thousands, of images with many of them realized with a meaning and for a purpose different from those of the observer /curator/historian/reader. The photographer's archive is a space of disorder open to a variety of interpretations, and many of the images in the archive would not considered to be art. This is quite different from painters producing masterpieces for the art institution.

The art photographer is both inside and outside the art institution.

Ferit Kuyas: Chongqing

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.

Ferit Kuyas, Chanjiang River, Beibin Road, Chongqing

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.

Chongqing is trying to clean up, but this, along with the growing inequality, is a low priority compared to economic growth. The environment needs protecting, but the regional government fears the social consequences. Economic growth requires environmental damage, and Chongqing is quite ready to pay that price.

Kuyas' project is “City of Ambition", which is a series of colour photographs from Chongqing, often taken from the outskirts of Chongqing, where the city can’t really be seen, but rather sensed.

Ferit Kuyas, Jialing Rivershore Drive, Chongqing

Big views big camera. We don't see this kind of work in Australia. The images indicate that China is the economic engine room of the 21st century.

aesthetics of catastrophe

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:

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.

My approach to this catastrophe works within the latter tradition.

Mayer in this section of a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that he read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University says:

Central to the practice of making pictures of disaster, suffering, catastrophe and the large events of our time is photography’s unique relationship to the real. One of the products of the enlightenment and the industrial revolution, and the concurrent advances in science, is the idea that there is a real world, one that is measurable in distinct times and places. It is empirical and is distinguished by facts and data. This real world also exists separately from the mythic or the general. Photography plays a unique role in bridging these two worlds, trading in both and using one to exert pressure on the other. At no other time in history have we so easily and so convincingly been able to exchange the mythic for the real and back again.

I have problems with the real here in that photography does not simply depict reality; it does not simply capture some pre-existing "truth." It is an interpretation of what exists can it can also be transformative and prefigurative.

I also have problems with 'mythic' here as well. What does that refer to in the context of the River Murray--- the myth making the desert bloom? The myth of farmers as the embodiment of the Anzac backbone of the nation? Photography is conversation among photographers and others across the national culture - a conversation that does not rely solely on textless images--- about the ecological destruction of the Murray-Darling Basin.

Thirdly, an aspect of the catastrophe of of New Orleans and the Murray Darling Basin is that they cannot be seen as a temporary glitch in an otherwise progressive culture and that life could go on as normal. The culture failed----to ensure the dykes could protect New Orleans and to reduce the over-allocation of water licences for irrigated agriculture in the Murray-Darling Basin. The fact that a century or more of Enlightenment culture failed to prevent the forces of destruction is an indictment of that culture that stands against attempts to normalise the past and forget the horror. Any notions of simply moving on after the catastrophe are delusory, whilst those who call for the resurrection of this culpable ‘culture’ become inextricably implicated.