These were ones that I'd taken whilst I was in transition to a digital world but didn't really understand what I was entering into. Though the negatives were processed and scanned by the lab, and I uploaded them to the Windows PC computer, I was still thinking in analogue terms despite having just joined Flickr.

In the fleetingly modish area of photography, which offered a relatively unconsolidated space adjacent to but displaced from the more solidified institutions of art and art history, debate in the 1970s turned on the search for alternative avenues of radical practice beyond the well-trodden paths of leftist documentary and reportage and outside the tramlines of realism and artifice that had dictated the parallel tracks of discourse on photography since its invention.

The point was not to offer a monolithic account; rather, the intent was to pluralize photography, to insist on the specificity of frames of meaning.

the persistent bent of photographic criticism from François Arago to Oliver Wendell Holmes and from Charles Baudelaire to Walter Benjamin had always been toward the totalization of photography, treating it as a homogeneous technology or singular medium whose meaning and historical consequences were somehow already immanent. Whether condemning photography’s alleged debasing effects or eulogizing its revolutionary productive potential, photographic criticism construed photography as a singular cultural force, for good or ill.

The discursive framing of a plurality of photographies effectively shreds the notion of “the medium,” whether conceived as an opaque material generating its own proper conventions or asa transparent vehicle mediating the efficient communication of meaning.

It is actually hotter down here on the coast than in Adelaide, which is not what I wanted at all. It is even too hot for the roofers. They've called it a day at lunch time saying they are getting too old for this kind of work; everything is too regulated, they are moving to Thailand and to hell with the superannuation.

This little break is a chance to reconnect with the style of photography that is developing whilst I'm down at Victor Harbor. I've been doing digital studies of rocks, seaweed and shells in the field and bringing the found objects back to the studio for tabletop shots.

Update
I listened to the Grateful Dead Live at Barton Hall - Cornell University on 1977-05-08. I came across this MP3 of the Grateful Dead's famous concert-- Live at Barton Hall - Cornell University on 1977-05-08 this evening:

May 1977 was seen as one of the highpoints of their live music performance--- a pinnacle tour for the Grateful Dead--much like the Fillmore run of February 1969, or the string of shows from June 1974.

On the other hand, painting gave me plenty of time to think. I found myself thinking about the ruins and decay in Tasmania--modern industrial ruins--including the useless or old or unusual—an aesthetics of decay. Associated with this is a cultural pessimism—a world conscious of its decline because of the abandoned houses and mines eroding or decaying under the elements as nature reclaimed them. Dereliction and decline in particular places such as Queenstown and Zeehan.

What we have is the cyclical nature of capitalism, whereby new industries suggest rational progress, but only at the expense of destroying old industries, entails a reworking of space in which disorder and mutability are suppressed. If there are any new industries in Queenstown and Zeehan then these are tourism.

Whilst in Tasmania I realized that though the Leica S2 may be the finest digital camera in regards to image quality I will never be able to buy one. Nor could I ever afford to buy the new Hasselblad H4D-40 megapixel camera, its medium format equivalent, or even the Nikon DX3.

As Elizabeth Carmel observes:

The Hasselblad system cost really does not make sense as an investment for people not making a living from their photography, unless you are independently wealthy and want the joy of working with the best money can buy.

This is not just returning to the old and outmoded, given the possibilities offerred by Apple's iPad and its e-book format for photographers to break free of the constraints of the publishing houses and create & distribute their own content.

The growth of the digital cloud will change both culture and creativity. Digital stores of data in the cloud, ubiquitous broadband, new search technologies, access through multiple devices – these should make more culture, more available than ever before to more people. We are also living through a massive proliferation of expressive capacity to add to and remix culture with cheaper, more powerful tools for making music and films, taking and showing images, drawing up designs and games.

Permanent clouds of global cultural resources for people to draw on will be created by public, private and voluntary contributions. An example of global public cloud culture is the World Digital Library. Wikipedia is the prime example of a global cultural resource created by volunteer contributions. Google is providing private funding to digitise a vast collection of out of copyright books. iStockphoto is a quasi-commercial collection of photographs mainly taken by amateurs. Flickr allows the creation of a vast collection of user-generated photographs

This treescape, with its straggly, rhythmic formations, breaks away from wilderness as beauty and the 19th-century landscape painters, whose scenes reinforced an idealised notion of place. It's effect is for us to ask a question rather than confirm a view (the Heidelberg School ) and so become aware of the baggage that comes with representing the landscape. We are obliged to deal with the tradition as well as the politics of the push to develop again in wilderness areas and the on urban encroachment onto the land.

This is a landscape prize, and it is awarded each year for the best new (previously unexhibited and less than a year old) painting depicting the Tasmanian landscape. The work of the previous winners of the prize is varied. However, the images of the 2010 finalists are not up.

John Glover is known for his contribution to the early development of the colonial picturesque in settler landscape art in Australia, due to his depiction of the Tasmanian light as bright and clear. Glover also did commissioned works for the proud landowners of the Colony and he contributed to the development of tourism promoting ‘places to see’ using the natural local scenery in perfect picturesque post cards’.

Tourists in Europe in the early 19th century sought to locate places described in works by poets, romantic novelists and painters of the time which would accord with the ‘beautiful’, ‘sublime ’ ,‘ picturesque’ and ‘romantic ’. For Glover this was English Lake District .The touring artist often carried special items designed to assist in `aesthetic response’, such as a camera lucida.

I couldn't resist this reference to Glover's A view of the artist's house and garden, in Mills Plains, Van Diemen's Land (1835) when I was in staying in Tunbridge.

Update
The 2010 finalists are now online and they are very diverse in their approach to the landscape. The 2010 winner is Ian Waldron's Walach Dhaarr (Cockle Creek)

The events that interest me are Street Dreams that is part of the DIY artist run festival and Renewing Adelaide. My reason is that it is nigh on impossible to legally set up an artist or community led space in the city centre on an ongoing basis in Adelaide, which lacks a vital urban artistic culture. Yet there are a lot of empty space in the city and those spaces make the city feel dead, especially when they remain empty for a period of years.

Adelaide like Newcastle is a ‘doughnut’ city –a city that lost their overnight populations and thus have a huge suburban belt but little city life with its sense of a lack of artistic community in the city centre, being isolated and bored with little option but to move to Melbourne.

The doughnut phenomenon is partly about the volume of empty space in the city, partly about the overnight population but moreover it describes whether a city has held its place as a regional cultural centre. Cities are, by definition, cultural hubs. If they’re not, they’re just glorified suburbs. Unlike Newcastle, Adelaide has succeeded in maintaining its day time life but after 5 PM on weeknights they look exactly the same – empty.

A city that loses its sense of cultural and community life after 5 PM and replaces it with a weekend suburbanite drinking culture is less safe, less inclusive and less appealing to tourists, students and everyone who doesn’t like throwing up and getting in fights.The absence of support for artist run spaces and small arts production groups [means] that the volume of micro events in Adelaide is staggeringly low.

These considerations are important because DIY festival refers to “Read/Write” culture in which ordinary citizens “read” their culture by listening to it or by reading representations of it, then add to the culture they read by creating and re-creating the culture around them. They do this re- creating using the same tools the professional uses. So we have a mixing, matching, and merging of visual and musical traditions taken from various sources.

However, the actual Smile material is accessible on numerous bootlegs and on YouTube. It is interesting to compare it to Brian Wilson's 2007 interpretation.

Smile was devised as a an album-length suite of specially-written songs which were both thematically and musically linked, and constructed from barely-related musical sections that were recorded, painstakingly spliced together, and then reduced into a short pop song.

Over time, the Beach Boys mutated into an oldies act, selling out large-scale tours on the strength of their nostalgic hits. What exists from the Smile period is the equivalent of many separate albums that might have been.

The Grateful Dead's version of Deep Elem Blues which they played from their earliest days up till 1983:

What is of interest is Green's observation that the band understood that in the information economy the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away.

Giving something away and earning money on the periphery is the same idea proffered by Wired editor Chris Anderson in his recent best-selling book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Voluntarily or otherwise, it is becoming the blueprint for more and more companies doing business on the Internet. Today, everybody is intensely interested in understanding how communities form across distances, because that’s what happens online.

It's good to see Levon Helm still making music, even if he still relies heavily on the The Band's back catalogue.

This is one aspect of the settler or pioneer history of British settlement and frontier industry in Tasmania. There are saw mill sites, sawdust heaps, discarded machinery, tramways, wharves and house areas--along with the clear felled spaces amidst the native rain forest and wilderness. Hence the idea of natural and cultural heritage--- world heritage based on the natural landscape been modified through the various industrial and occupational activities.

Australians came late to the realisation that their natural environment and the historical imprint of past generations upon the landscape were valued possessions to treasure. Such features comprised not only material traces, such as forests, geological monuments, buildings, ruins or archaeological sites, but also intangibles associated with past persons or events, symbolic of ideas, memory or spirituality.
Such intangible or non-material factors present alternative considerations, additional to potential economic development or that overworked catch-cry of ‘jobs’. When carefully assessed, these valued places may provide different opportunities for employment or development, such as tourism. Even when they cannot, once-off economic investment or temporary employment should not be the sole criterion in a balanced approach to Australia’s long-term cultural or ecological future.

The French expedition undertook scientific studies, while subsequent European activities across almost two centuries left imprints upon the landscape, although often concealed beneath vegetation. It is important to stress that my reaction, and that of most people, was not an attack upon the forest industry or the rights of landowners. It simply was that this small area was too significant to destroy.

Only Recherche Bay is not wilderness. It has a cultural history of French discovery, scientific expeditions and encounters with the aboriginal population and private landholding of the land that dates back to the early twentieth century, if not earlier. It is a cultural landscape.

The private land exists outside the national park which is a popular camping site for Tasmanians. During the 1830s and 1840s it was the site of a bay whaling station he main commercial activities in the later 1800s and into the early 1900s were timber-gathering and coal mining.

The rain forest is messy, there is a monochrome greenness to everything, the sunlight in the dark spaces makes conditions difficult, and it is to hard lugging medium format camera's and heavy tripods for hours on end. I'm just not set up for this kind of photography.

My initial solution is to concentrate on detail in the more open areas of the rain forest.The second solution is to explore a space that is easily accessible so that I can walk in with the medium format camera's and heavy tripods. The third solution is to use a digital camera when walking sections of the Overland Track.

The Midlands around Tunbridge is an agricultural district of crops and grazing that is earmarked to be upgraded to irrigation agriculture in Jonathan West's Report for the Australian Innovation Research Centre at the University of Tasmania entitled ----An Innovation Strategy for Tasmania A New Vision for Economic Development.

It was raining in Tunbridge--the driest part of Tasmania --whereas in Queenstown, one of the wetest areas, it was very dry.