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March 24, 2010
I watched a documentary by Michael Angus and Murray Fredericks called SALT which was shown on the ABC Artscape programme. This was based on a visual diary about Frederick's Lake Eyre project in the remote north corner of South Australia. You can stream, vodcast or watch it on iview tomorrow from the Artscape page.
Murray Fredericks, tent and bike, Lake Eyre series
Salt is a series of photographs of vast space and emptiness that conveyed a sense of space and the annulment of self. It began in 2003 and involved camping on Lake Eyre for a month or so each year with a with a 8x10 Toyo field camera being used to explore the nuances of light and space.
Murray Fredericks, Salt 23, Lake Eyre series
The project reduces the landscape to its elemental aspects and only intermittently includes the visual anchor for most orthodox landscape photography - the line of the horizon. What is represented are landscapes suffused with light, space and colour at dusk, dawn and night that deliberately avoid any natural, animal or human features that would give a sense of scale to his work, thereby break with the traditional language of landscape photography.
Fredericks, who runs a successful commercial architectural photography practice using high end medium format digital equipment, uses a lot of equipment. He says that:
During the visits of 2007-8, the project developed again. An HD video camera, time lapse equipment and a high-resolution digital stills system was carried out onto the Lake along with the 'traditional' format. Footage of the trip was seen by director Michael Angus, who immediately 'recognized' a documentary in the making. Michael obtained significant funding from the ABC, the Adelaide Film Festival and the Film Finance Corporation to produce 'SALT'.
This is an example of a photographer immersing himself into the landscape rather than standing outside it, n but it requires far more resources to do than I have at my disposal. But the staying in one place and photographing the interactions between space and light with a large format camera is an interesting one; one that I can do from the cliff tops at Victor Harbor.
The Lake Eyre project has come to an end---Greenland is next place to mind's relationship to emptiness and visual representations of that.
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The Queensland Centre for Photography has a list of Australian photographers but it doesn't include Murray Fredericks. Nor does it include Leigh Perry who does similar work from the shore of Sydney's coastline.
See Perry's Invariance and Peripheral Visions projects. Also some of the Fractured project.
By the way Robert McFarlane has a new blog---Oz Photo Review