Shintaro Sato is a photographer known for his iridescent images of Tokyo’s twilight taken with a Toyo 4 x 5 camera from the various 10th floor fire escapes that serve as his observation deck. He walks around during the daytime scouting locations to find a good location. He carries a map and notebook and marks down the place, the name of the building, the address.

He is asked these questions in this interview: Why did you shoot the Tokyo Twilight Zone project with film? Why not even then use a digital camera? Sato says its:

Just a quality problem. Resolution, quality. I needed high resolution. If I could have used a digital camera equal to large format film, maybe I would have used that....I want to see much more details in my picture. If possible, I want to be able to see the expressions on the faces of people who are standing in the distance, after enlarging the photo. You can sometimes see people in my picture, after enlarging. I want to show what kind of face, what kind of person is there. So high resolution is important. And if I make a very large picture, for example 1 meter wide on one side, you can see a man who is lying on his side in his room. I can see that in this picture

This rather drab landscape subverts the classic postcard view of the city--usually a series of symmetrical golden terraces with hilly gardens and the occasional spire. It is is composed with a Claudean symmetry that viewers will encounter in many of Gainsborough’s pictures. Trees frame the distant city and a scrubby, rocky foreground leads the eye to a dominant middle ground with a misty landscape beyond.

Ennis adds that:

In contrast to the United States where photography went hand and hand with the opening up of the American frontier, in Australia it did not ... From the outset landscape photographers in Australia have tended to base their practice on an extended and often intimate engagement with a particular area or site---for example, or through return visits ... The approaches developed by landscapists have proved remarkably consistent. The predilection has been for the settled, humanized landscape above all else, and inland areas rather than the coast. The modes of representation used most widely have generally been undramatic: the picturesque and a more prosaic that emerged in the 1890s and persistent for decades. The latter, a landscape of the everyday, can be seen in part as a response to the hugely influential work of of the Australian Impressionist painters known as the Heidelberg School. (pp. 53-54).

Landscapes that were ordinary rather than awesome provided a measure of reassurance to settlers who found themselves, not only displaced from 'home' on the other side of the world, but living in a vastly different, even alien natural and culture environment ... photographers and their clients did not seek out what was strange, wanting instead to reconcile difference.They shared the desire the desires for comfortable, palatable images of a landscape that in becoming domesticated was also becoming familiar---'possessed' in both literal and imaginative terms.

One of the consequences of newspapers transitioning to a digital world is that their revenue drops, their capital value drops and they are obliged to cut costs until new revenue streams can come online. That means journalists, photographers, sub-editors etc are laid off as the news desk is downsized.

I've also been and doing a bit of research on the region as well as background to my phototrip, and I came across the Mike Key photographs of Queenstown around 1995:

I know next to nothing about Mike Key. He did an architectural photographic study of Newfolk on the Derwent River in 1995. It breaks away from the wilderness work of Olegas Truchanas and Peter Dombrovskis, which was centrally concerned with the protection of the natural environment and of wilderness in particular.

Obesity has overtaken smoking as the leading cause of premature death and illness in Australia. In 2008, the costs associated with obesity in Australia were estimated to be more than $58 billion and it is only going to get worse.

Australia today is ranked as one of the fattest nations in the developed world. On average, obesity reduces life expectancy by six to seven years.

A residency at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles where he discovered the archive of the Californian architect John Lautner (1911 – 1994). He photographed 12 architectural models he discovered in the Lautner archive:

The lines, planes, textures and colours Demand composes from Lautner's models recall modernist painting and sculpture, including Picasso’s reliefs and fragments of cubist bricolage, as well as mid-20th century abstract painting.

The representation of battered old models from different angles is independent of the buildings to which they refer:

They are abstractions that refer back to the some of the early modernist work ofPaul Outerbridge from 1921 – 1933 that explored cubism.

Ergas argues that if conduct violates the law, we should expect those responsible to be held to account. The law ought to apply to the protesters at the Aboriginal tent embassy exactly as as it applies to everyone else, including the Cronulla rioters.

Leak's cartoon depicts The Left as populist, confused, ugly and angry. They--the ugly Australian--- look very much like the right wing anti-carbon legislation rioters and the truckies circling parliament house.

What is obscured by the cartoon is what the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra was about --a protest about the dispossession of indigenous people from their traditional land in settler Australia, the use of English law to legitimate that violence and the ongoing racism by white Australians towards aboriginal Australians.

The Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the lawn opposite (Old) Parliament House is a powerful symbol. Strangers in their own country, the aboriginal people established diplomatic representation to negotiate with the federal government about their land rights.

According to the art historians Kathleen Sauerbier was one of the first artists to respond to the southern coastal area in the Fleurieu Peninsula in a Modernist style. Her landscapes, with their limited use of colour, fluid line-work and simplified forms, exemplify her influence on fellow Australian painter Horace Trenerry.

As I I haven't read Jane Hylton''s The painted coast: Views of the Fleurieu Peninsula south of Adelaide I cannot put Sauerbier's Willunga work into this South Australian regional (Normanville, Second Valley, Port Willunga, Aldinga, Maslins, Victor Harbor, Goolwa, the Coorong) landscape tradition.

There was also the launch of the first issue of Australian Modern, a magazine about 1950s modernism in Oz. It was a glorious summer evening, people were going out to eat, and it was a fascinating exhibition.

I'm ashamed to admit that I just didn't know this Adelaide abstract modernist work at all--not even that of Wladyslaw Dutkiewicz, who was an expressionist, constructivist, abstract and semi-abstract painter and occasional sculptor who was also involved in theatrical design, directing and acting. He appears to have faded off the screen of conventional art history that constructs Adelaide modernism in terms of Dorrit Black, Dora Chapman, James Cant and Kathleen Sauerbier.

Wlad and his younger brother Ludwik were part of the influx of migrant artists who arrived in Australia after the Second World War. They settled in South Australia and soon became two of Adelaide's leading modernist painters in the 1950s and 1960s. At the exhibition opening Adam mentioned that the Dutkiewicz family hosted regular salons and parties and their home was the hub of creative life in Adelaide.

The exhibition highlighted how sketchy my understanding of South Australian modernism was. Despite abstraction becoming mainstream in a modernist culture after the 1950s I thought that this form barely existed in Adelaide. My vague understanding was that there had been a strong Surrealist undercurrent in Adelaide modernism.

Ludwik Dutkiewicz worked as a botanical illustrator for the Adelaide Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium. He became the state’s first official botanic illustrator, a position he held for 30 years before retiring in 1983.

Adam is an art critic and art historian as well as a painter. He published a “quarterly” arts magazine, Words And Visions (WAV), issues 1-17 in the 1980s and currently runs the interesting Moon Arrow Press. He remains a resolute modernist --art is experimental and aims for masterpieces---in opposition to the corruption and commercialization of the art institution's gallery system.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, from a window in Oaks on Market, Melbourne, 2011

In the history of photography huge home-made wet glass plates led to store-bought dry plates which led to 8 x 10" sheet film which led to 4 x 5" sheet film which led to 2-1/4" roll film which led to 35mm which led to digital. Digital imaging is the technological winner these days. Today's digital SLRs replace 35mm, no big deal.

What should be avoided is holding onto the assumption that identifies the pictorial tradition of realism with the essence of photographic technology and the tradition of montage and collage with the essence of digital imaging. The reason is that what is taken to be the essence of photographic and digital imaging technology are two traditions of visual culture. Both existed before photography, and both span different visual technologies and mediums. Just as its counterpart, the realistic tradition extends beyond photography per se and at the same time accounts for just one of many photographic practices.

He paints big canvases --walling filling, eg., the Closer Grand Canyon painting of 1998 ---and in bright, often discordant and gaudy colours. Digital video stills, the simultaneous operation of nine cameras, and the iPhone and iPad are now his instruments of drawing.

One of the final rooms in the exhibition presents a bank of screens – multi-camera footage of Yorkshire mixed with interior films and motifs from Hockney’s paintings. The videos have been filmed simultaneously using nine and eighteen cameras, fitted on customised cars, providing a spell-binding, immersive experience.

The video features some of Don Van Vliet's abstract abstract expressionist paintings. By 1985 Van Vliet's work was showing in the most prestigious galleries of Soho. Don Van Vliet died in december 2010 at 69 of multiple sclerosis.

Photographs came to represent something more than a portrait or a recordiong of family life. They became extensions of our minds; they replaced our memories. They remind their makers of a person, place, or event with special meaning or importance to their lives. The Kodak prints of the snapshots were generally kept with their negatives, in boxes and drawers to await a definitive culling that rarely came.

Kodak has been replaced by Apple's iPhone and Facebook--the latter's marketing says that its Timeline help us to tell the story of our life" as it would allow us to "highlight and curate all your stories so you can express who you really are."

None of the photographers presented by Philip Jones were professionals, they were there to do a job, be it policing the district, in the case of Aiston, or telegraph operator, as Gillen was for many years at Alice Springs and Charlotte Waters. There was also a medical scientist, an artist, a doctor and a missionary. Often these men had a fair amount of spare time and used it to collect and record information for the South Australian and other Museums or to publish their research or journals. Most of White’s bird specimens were sent to John Gould in England.

Gillen was a station master at the Alice Springs Telegraph Station from 1891 to 1899 and the local magistrate in Alice Springs. He mostly photographed aboriginal people using a large dry-plate tripod mounted camera between 1894 and 1897. He produced some 400 glass negatives, and some of this work appeared in Gillen and Baldwin Spencer's text Native Tribes in Central Australia.