A picture from the archives: it is from an early morning poodlewalk in 2022 with Kayla.
The photo below was made on a poodlewalk with Kayla along the Esplanade at Victor Harbor in 2022 with a medium format film camera.
This was one of our regular early morning poodlewalks. We would walk along the beach from the mouth of the Inman River to the Granite Island causeway, then return along the footpath to the car. It took about an hour.
Judging from the negatives that I have scanned so far it looks as if I didn't make many Fleurieuscape architectural photos in 2022. There's not that much of architectural interest along the Esplanade.
During the winter months I have been photographing the clouds and sea of Encounter Bay on the early morning poodlewalks. This photography has generally been before sunrise from the eastern side of Rosetta Head. The clouds usually disappear after sunrise
An example:
These are not just cloud studies nor just light studies as often it is the play of light on the water that attracts me as well as the clouds.
The clouds, light and colours change rapidly between 15 minutes before sunrise and 15 minutes afterwards.
]]>A brief excursion to Parsons Beach in Waitpinga:
It was an exploratory excursion. I have usually avoided going there because it is a surfing beach with access through the Newland Head Conservation Park. So I cannot take the poodles with me.
]]>I have been taking advantage of the recent overcast weather conditions to photograph in the Spring Mount Conservation Park. The park is small (2.79 square kilometres), consists of mature stringybarks (both Eucalyptus obliqua and E. baxteri), and looks as if it provides a good habitat for the yellow tailed black cockatoo (Calyptorhynchus funereus). We only see these cockatoos in Encounter Bay when they feed on the pine cones in the late summer/early autumn.
The Spring Mount Conservation Park is on a ridge lying between the Inman Valley (in the south) and the Hindmarsh Tiers Valley (in the north). It is in a high rainfall area and I discovered that it can be raining there whilst it is sunny on the Victor Harbor coast, which is just 15- 20 minutes away by car. I have been mostly photographing on the Inman Valley side of the park, as well as walking along the roads along the edge of the park such as the Mt Alma Rd and the Strangeways Rd.
The photo above was made whilst I was walking along Strangeways Rd with the poodles. This road runs east from Mt Alma Rd then south dropping down through farmland in the valley to Sawpit Rd near the Inman Valley Rd. It's a loop. We only walked a couple of kilometres along Strangeways Rd. I have yet to explore the rest of this road in the car. Nor have I walked along the trails within the park.
]]>This picture is from Mount Alma Rd looking north across some farmland towards the Spring Mount Conservation Park in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula:
The Spring Mount Conservation Park is situated on a broad ridge that stands between the Inman Valley and the Hindmarsh Tiers Rds. The trees in the park are mostly mature Brown Stringybark (Eucalyptus baxteri) and Messmate Stringybark (E. obliqua).
]]>I have returned to making some more photos of the coastal architecture at Victor Harbor on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. This is a break from the daily photos of the bushland and coastal rocks made whilst I am on the morning and afternoon poodlewalks.
Most of the new coastal architecture is cheaply built holiday houses that would probably last only a generation. They don't even have foundations. The builders just plonk a series of concrete blocks in 4 corners. There is no concrete slab.
This particular house is situated on Encounter Lakes is more up market and better built. Encounter Lakes is a new housing estate built around a human made saltwater lake situated along Bartel Boulevard at Encounter Bay.The houses are basically built for retirees: one level and low maintenance. The emphasis is on lifestyle.
Another version of a retiree house, this time one along Franklin Parade in Encounter Bay that is facing the sea. Franklin Parade is seen as a prime location.
The cashed up retirees are leaving Adelaide and moving down to live beside the sea on the southern coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula.
]]>This snapshot was made after returning from a late afternoon poodlewalk in late April. Suzanne had returned from a trip to Eyre Peninsula so I didn't need to walk the two poodles and so I was able to spend more time making photos on the walk, rather than keeping an eye on the poodles. I did a number of cloud studies whilst on the poodlewalk.
There was no one around at the time, which is unusual, as Petrel Cove is a popular tourist location in the late afternoon. I was reversing the car from the car park to drive home and made the snapshot through the windscreen. It was just before I left for the Melbourne trip.
]]>During the transition from summer to autumn this year I started a study of clouds from the top of Rosetta Head in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. I was building on these earlier photos.
From Rosetta Head I was usually looking east north east.
The clouds were above Encounter Bay, and the photos were made in the early morning, generally before sunrise. The photo above is an example.
]]>On Boxing Day 2020 Kayla and I went walking early as we had friends staying with us over Xmas. The early morning poodlewalk was along Bridge Terrace in Victor Harbor. We slowly made our way to the mouth of the Hindmarsh River. The ephemeral river had stopped flowing, the light was good and people were already walking along, and exercising on, the beach
I decided to take the odd photo of some of the seaside houses along Bridge Terrace as we walked by them. This older house in a grand style at no. 22 Bridge Terrace was for sale.
Would it remain after it was sold? Or would it be pulled down? I hoped that it was heritage listed as there are very examples of this old grand seaside architectural style.
]]>I occasionally make a still life when I'm out walking with Kayla on an early morning poodlewalk. The materials used in the open studio are what I find washed up on the local beaches. This picture is a recent example of such an object:
This glass bottle with shells growing on it was lying on the sand on western edge of Depledge Beach, west of Victor Harbor. The picture opens up a world (the littoral zone) and it discloses the various elements within that world's network of interconnections. The artwork stands in a particular place and in specific relation to that which is configured around it. So argues Heidegger in his essay, 'The Origin of the Work of Art'.
]]>The cloud formations that move across Encounter Bay around Victor Harbor are often quite dramatic.
The photos of the clouds are usually made from on top of Rosetta Head in the early morning:
The cloud shapes are constantly changing.
]]>During the school holidays a funfair or amusement park is set up near the causeway to Granite Island. It is a tiny public space for Girder Family Amusements: a space between the holding pens for the horse drawn carriage to the Granite Island Recreation Park and the barbecue area in the Soldiers Memorial Gardens.
But a seaside town must have a funfair with its ferris wheel, dodgem cars, inflatable double slides etc etc. It is tradition--just like the horse drawn carriage to Granite Island and the Cockle train to Goolwa. There for the family day tourists.
]]>Below are some more images in the ongoing series of suburban architecture at Victor Harbor in South Australia. These photos, which were made just prior to the Covid-19 lockdown whilst I was on an early morning poodlewalk with Kayla. They are part of photography as placemaking.
This is at a time when the global digital photographic market is contracting and stagnating, resulting in Olympus selling off their camera business (a Micro 4/3 system) to a private equity firm. Covid-19 has increased the stagnation as it has bought photography to more or less a standstill since February 2020. One consequence is that there will inevitably be more consolidation in the camera industry and that the emphasis of my photography is on the local due to national travel restricted and international travel untenable. There will be more walking locally.
This white house is on the western end of The Esplanade. It overlooks the beach, is opposite a caravan park and it is near the mouth of the ephemeral Inman River. Kayla and I often walk past it on the return leg of the walk that we do along the Esplanade beach from Kent Reserve.
This house is at the other end of The Esplanade and it looks out to Granite Island.
Prior to the Covid-19 lockdown Kayla and I went on an early morning poodlewalk around the streets that border the estuary, lagoon and mouth of the Hindmarsh River. This is an older, residential part of Victor Harbor and it overlooks the railway line to the river port town of Goolwa, the beach and Encounter Bay. The houses are on a hill and their view of Encounter Bay includes Granite Island.
An early part of the walk on this occasion was the western part of the suburb of Hayborough. This is a well established part of Victor Harbor with many of the houses tucked away amongst the bush overlooking the Hindmarsh estuary and so difficult to photograph. Privacy is everything for the old Adelaide money. Fortunately, this particular house is not tucked away:
Another part of our walk was along Bridge Terrace in Victor Harbor that is just west of the mouth of Hindmarsh River This residential part of Victor Harbor overlooks a reserve and Encounter Bay, and runs from the the Granite Island causeway to Bridge PoInt, which overlooks the estuary and mouth of the Hindmarsh River:
The purpose of the poodlewalk was to have a break from both walking the back country roads and photographing the coastal rocks. landscape. I also wanted to photograph some of the residential architecture before some of these fine, old buildings are pulled down to make way for the newer double storey McMansion style homes.
]]>The landscape b+w picture below of roadside vegetation in Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula is from the archives. It was recently shared with the Melbourne-based Friends of Photography Group (FOPG).
The subtext of landscape art in Australia has been resolutely national; indeed, national identity—the Australianness of Australian art--tacitly assumed the primacy of the nation. I would have thought that the concept of empire would be central, since Australia was part of the British empire. An example would be the early colonial painters such as John Glover, who struggled to reconcile the Australian landscape with the confines of the picturesque, the dominant landscape aesthetic of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The picturesque was in effect the visual language of the colonisers--it highlighted the beauty rather than the hardships of imperial lands, depicting colonial Australia as a land ripe for settlement.
]]>This landscape picture is of a rocky outcrop just west of Kings Head in Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. It was made on an early morning poodlewalk that Kayla and I did. We hadn't been to this location to photograph since the autumn of 2019.
It was an overcast morning in late summer, on the cusp of summer and autumn. It was after a storm had just passed through Victor Harbor a few days earlier. The outcrop is on the Heysen Trail, but it can only be accessed when the tide is low.
]]>Domestic coastal architecture is primarily a space for living within. Traditionally the buildings are sparse and functional. They are summer holiday houses simply built. Their exteriors are so ordinary as to pass unnoticed.
At Encounter Bay the 1940-50s houses are slowly being pulled down and grander seaside designs are being built. 51 Franklin Parade, Encounter Bay is a recent example:
I have been slowly photographing the roadside vegetation in my local area on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula with large format cameras--in this case a 5x4 Linhof Technika IV. This kind of slow photography is an attempt to photograph nature whilst avoiding working within the tradition of wilderness photography, which is where a lot of large format photographers in Australia have situated themselves and their work.
The roadside vegetation subject matter is often mundane, ordinary and boring. It requires a lot of scoping to find something that is suitable to photograph, and I basically do the scoping whilst I am on my daily poodle walks along back country roads. These walks allow me to become familiar with the bush and early morning light during the autumn, winter and early spring months.
This particular tree study emerged from my frequent early morning poodle walks along Baum Rd in Waitpinga It's a no exit road that runs between agricultural /grazing fields and it leads to farms and holiday houses along the coastal edge of the Waitpinga Cliffs. This minimal traffic means that this road is ideal for early morning poodle walks.
]]>We went for a an exploratory drive through the hills of the Fleurieu Peninsula towards Yankalilla to become more familiar with the back country roads in our local region. I used the trip in this place to scope some future photographic possibilities. Yankalilla is on the western side of the Peninsula. It is not often that we venture to the western Fleurieu Peninsula.
We started the trip driving along the roads that were familiar with --the ones that Suzanne had walked along when she did the Heysen Trail (Tugwell Rd + Keen Rd). Then we turned west along Hancock Rd and spent a bit of time wandering around, and exploring, the ruins of this Congressional Church at Bald Hills on Hancock Rd. It was our only stop on the trip to Yankallila.
After leaving the ruins of the church we continued along Hancock Rd, turned right into Mayfield Rd, then left into the Inman Valley Rd, which runs east/west across the Peninsula. We drove west along the Inman Valley Rd to the outskirts of the Yankalilla township. We turned around before entering the Yankalilla township, drove back along the Inman Valley Rd before turning into Torrens Vale Rd. We then drove along Parawa Rd up to Range Rd, which is one of the main east west roads across the Peninsula.
]]>The coast of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula can be quite wild and dangerous especially when the weather is rough or stormy:
When I am walking in those conditions I experience the coastal landscape as dark and strange. Hence my attempts with granite, or rock pools to find a way to represent the dark and the strange without embracing a mystical version of the noumenal world.
This image, for instance, is an attempt to make the coastal landscape along the southern Fleurieu Peninsula dark and strange without going mystical --ie referring to a noumenal world of processes, forms, or ideas that lies behind the phenomenal world that is experienced by us.
The noumenal world can be invoked when trying to explain the phenomenal, by describing the underlying causes of the phenomenal through theoretical reason. Thus theoretical natural science refers to a world of molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks, the curvature of space-time, black holes, the Big Bang, etc. However, this is not the world of objects in space and time (eg.,rocks, sea, seaweed, rock pools etc) that I daily experience with my senses when I am on a poodlewalk.
]]>This picture is from the archives. It was made in 2013 at Kings Head, Waitpinga, just below Kings Beach Retreats. We were still living in Adelaide's CBD at the time, and coming down to Encounter Bay every second weekend.
This photo session incorporated a poodlewalk to Kings Head from the car park at Kings Head Rd and back again. This walk is part of the Heysen Trail to Waitpinga Beach in the Newland Heads Conservation Park, and then to the Trail's starting point at Cape Jervis.
I remembered this image when I uploaded this digital version, which was made 5 years latter as a scoping study. The above picture is a 5x4 scanned colour file that has been converted into black and white. So I had already made the 5x4 picture (along with several medium format versions made in the same year) that I was scoping for in January 2018. My memory was that the previous 5x4 attempt hadn't been successful--people said they didn't think much of the image -- so I felt that I needed to have another go. Hence the digital scoping.
]]>Lately, I have been thinking about stepping beyond the boundaries of this Fleurieuscapes blog that doesn't really go anywhere. I have been thinking along the lines of having another solo exhibition, or of producing a photobook. I have enough material, and my thinking has been that the book is primary and the exhibition is secondary, in that the latter could be used to launch the photo book.
Judging from my experience with the previous Fleurieuscapes exhibition, exhibitions with framed prints are expensive, they have a short existence, and they are quickly forgotten. Few are the memories of them. So it doesn't really add up. However, an exhibition could be used as a platform to launch a photo book, thereby making the latter known to the public at the opening. Distribution is the really big problem with photobooks and launching the book at the opening night of the exhibition would help.
If so, then it is really becomes a question of how to organize the material in a photobook. It needs to have an idea to distinquish it from all the other photobooks being produced. The one that I have toyed with in the past a topological thinking is the idea of place--that is, my experiences of being in a place that is the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. In Heideggerian language to be is to be in place. So it is being -at-home-in-a place.
Photography, after all, is a way of collecting experiences, whilst the book is a way of moving photography away from the white walls of the art gallery. In this case a photography of a limited situatedness of existence in a place that is a series of events or processes in an open region .
This picture was made on an early autumn morning along Franklin Parade in Encounter Bay, Victor Harbor. Franklin Parade runs close to the beach, and it is where the old beachside houses from the 20th century are rapidly being replaced with the larger two story ones.
I was on a poodlewalk with Kayla along the Encounter Bay beach. It was just after sunrise:
Encounter Bay is now my belonging place (home) in the sense that this is where my self belongs. It is where my identity formation as a photographer has formed. A sense of grounding in place provides a solid basis on which to build a sense of identity. This carries with it a sense of responsibility of caring for place that feeds back into, and reinforces, the cohesion of a sense of place. It implies how we as a geographically bounded community collectively learn to live with one another on this earth.
]]>As I mentioned in this post on the poodlewalks blog, I have neglected the Fleurieuscapes project because of my focus on other projects. Though I have been plugging away in a desultory and sporadic fashion, but I really unsure of what I am trying to do with this body of work from my coastal-based photographic practice. Photography, I've realised is good at showing and lousy at explaining. So what an I going to show?
The project is about place, and it is different to the Littoral Zone, Abstraction and Tree projects, even if it does incorporate the odd image from these other projects. Place in the sense of the space of the Fleurieu Peninsula, where people live and have made this space their home. So though Fleurieuscapes incorporates nature it also looks at the built environment at a specific historical moment.
]]>One of the dominate features of the coastline of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula is the movement of the southern ocean along the shoreline. My access to the shoreline is set by the tides and the waves. The sea dumps the dead birds and fish, the seaweed, shells, and the flotsam on the beach or amongst the granite rock, and it then washes them away.
It is the sea as well as the winds that represents the flux of the shore, and shifts the sand on the beaches at Petrel Cove and at Dep's Beach. The sea is also an ever-present danger.
Despite the Fleurieu Peninsula having a long geological history there are no fossils of extinct boneless animals in the rocks along the granite coast, as is the case amongst the limestone cliffs of the treeless Nullarbor Plain.
However, the sea has been a crucial in the land-forming process in the Fleurieu Peninsula's geological history. What largely accounts for the shape and extent of the Fleurieu Peninsula and its Inman River catchment was glaciation of Antarctic proportions that occurred about 300 million years ago when the Antarctic continent was welded against southern Australia. The Peninsula was shaped by the folding and faulting from the Permian glaciation, which affected much of Australia around 300 million years ago.
The ice mass ground its way across the Fleurieu landscape, and it was channelled through the pre-glacial bedrock valley, such as the Inman Trough. The Peninsula and its Inman River catchment was overridden by a continental ice sheet from the south west, and it moved in a northwesterly direction carving through and across the bedrock.
]]>Though the Hindmarsh River doesn't flow during the summer time its estuary is still one of my favourite spots in Victor Harbor:
The view that bush culture has been the dominant culture in colonial Australia overlooks the culture of the beach and the coast.The coast is neither land or sea, nature or culture, but partakes of both.
The part of the coast that I walk is not the beach--it is between Petrel Cove and Kings Beach which are surf beaches with sandy foreshores. An image of Petrel Cove:
This is a coastal environment where are there few people along the rocks of the foreshore. Most people stroll along the path of the Heritage Trail along the cliff top and only a few venture down to the rocks below.
So there is a sense in which the freedom of the beach (it is public property) extends to the rock foreshore. The immediate hinterland behind the path is farming land--ie., private property. What happens when the farm is eventually sold?
It is divided up into smaller blocs--10 acres--which become holiday places that are often for rent
If the Fleurieuscapes book is to be centred around a poetics of homecoming---with its associated words of dwelling, place, region, abiding and building, then the various words need to be unpacked.
Firstly, we need to unpack what is is meant by poetics. It is broader than poetry in that it implies a creative act that points to something beyond itself. This refers to poiesis or a bringing into being: an unending creative struggle to express that which conditions and informs our worlds of meaning and yet resists being exhaustively articulated in the terms of these worlds.
How does this conception of poetics relate to visual art including photography?
The starting point would have to be Kant, since it was he who first systematically outlined the logical grammar or conceptual machinery of aesthetics though his categorical separation of knowledge /truth as in the natural sciences, morality and aesthetic in modernity into separate domains. In the Critique of Judgement Kant acknowledges that scientific cognition excludes aspects of ourselves from its view of nature and that this must be accounted in other than cognitive terms.
He does this in terms of an aesthetics that is based on the imagination, autonomous art, intuition, aesthetic ideas, taste and the lack of concept. Kant, in other words, in inscribing art with the autonomous domain of the aesthetic relegates art and aesthetics to what is outside truth and goodness. Autonomous art is autonomous from truth and morality.
]]>I have tentatively started to develop the idea of photographing the fleeting moments in the ordinary into a poetics of homecoming. What I have in mind is that my photographing humble things--an example is this body of work by Yamamoto Masao ----- emerges into a concern with homecoming in response to the state of homelessness in our contemporary world.
Homecoming can be considered along the lines of an overcoming of the state of homelessness. The philosophic conception of the homeless condition has its roots in Nietzsche's discourse on nihilism in modernity, which he understood in terms of the emptying out of the highest values hitherto.
Nietzsche's account is that the erosion of the highest values hitherto means that these values are losing influence and meaning for us, and that we have fallen out of the traditional stories or grand narratives. We are uprooted, and live a nomadic existence in a world without certainty, value, or purpose. We have dispensed with all the prevailing ideals, values and myths that traditionally provide solace. We are no longer at home anywhere, and there is a longing for a place in which they can be at home. Hence the state of homesickness with its nostalgic aching for a home where we belong.
