February 15, 2010
Queensland, a mining town, is surrounded by wilderness---the South-West Wilderness is world heritage---and is home to some wilderness photographers such as Ivan Stringer. Roslynn D. Haynes, in Tasmanian Visions: Landscapes in Writing, Art and Photography explores the idea of wilderness that arose in opposition to the threats to the existence of wild rivers and old- growth forests from dams, mining, logging and other forms of commercial exploitation.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Iron Blow Mine, 2010
Haynes says:
As in the case of the desert, a vital role in the popularization of wilderness was played by artists, notably photographers. Like the flat expanse of the desert, most of the dense rainforest was un-paintable – for different reasons. There was too much of it, too close, too crowded. Unless you could position yourself on the other side of a handy lake – as Piguenit characteristically did, and as the Lake Pedder artists and photographers did, you would have enormous difficulty composing a landscape in traditional artistic terms. We needed Olegas Truchanas and even more Peter Dombrovskis, to invent a new way of depicting wilderness. We have now come to accept their new visual codes and conventions, so that a detail – a fern frond, a fungus, a single tree and of course, most famously, Rock Island Bend on the Franklin – can stand for the imagined whole. Without these images wilderness would never have secured the hearts and minds of Australia.
This definition of wilderness excludes the active presence of human beings to preserve its pristine state even though aborigines have preceded the settlers and hikers and photographers walk through wilderness.
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