Below are two analogue photos from  the on-going, post-studio roadside series. This  is a minor photographic  series that has emerged from the various poodlewalks in and around Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia.

 The site of the first photo  is the southern side of the eastern end of Depledge Rd whilst the site of the second photos is Halls Creek Rd, with  both sites  in  Waitpinga.   Both  photos being  made with a Linhof Technika 70 coupled to  a Linhof 6x9 film back,  and Kodak Porto 160 ASA film in  the late afternoon.   

What could be more mundane  than the roadside of a back country road,  which people treat as a dumping ground for their  illegal dumping? What could be less uninteresting as an artwork? It is about as interesting as Ed Ruscha's serial photographic project entitled Various Small Fires  that presents a sequence of such objects  (matches that are alight, a lighter that’s fired, a lit cigar, a lit cigarette, an ignited gas ring and so  forth).

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In the 1960-70s the established understanding of art was the singular, precious, expertly made and evaluated art object, which ruled art history, the art market, and museums. In the then cultural backwater of Australia art   training took place primarily in the publicly funded art school. These  were primarily vocational, focused on the transmission of  practical, manual skills or art makings  and  were centred around studio practice.   

The autonomy of the art school  started disappearing  when it became part of the College of Advanced Education in 1973.   This reform sought to formalize and elevate the study of art and design nationally through the introduction of university-style academic requirements.  The “Art Theory” course, which  built upon the new climate and system of liberal education,  further underscored the importance of general and specialist knowledge—from both within and outside of the discipline of art— and critical and logical thinking. 

This was when the traditionalist notions of artmaking and the expressive theory of  art were  under siege from  American minimalists, conceptualists, and critics  who were pushing past the boundaries of painting and sculpture by delegating the production of their artworks to industrial fabricators and artisans, polemically downplaying the importance of execution and highlighting the primacy of the idea or concept. The minimalists (Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Tony Smith) in  placing   the subject's experience of the specific object (ie., its reception) over the formal qualities of an autonomous art work, highlighted that the spectator is crucial for completing the work of art. 

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Fire.  In Talisker Conservation Park. This park  is located on the south-western area of the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia,  is north west of Deep Creek Conservation Park, and it is populated by rough barked manna gum (Eucalyptus viminalis spp. cygnetensis).

 It is primarily known for the  former Talisker Silver Mine, which  is of significant heritage value, as a largely intact example of historical silver mining practises that represent Cornish mining traditions and mine construction techniques. Deep Creek Conservation Park is the  largest portion of remaining natural vegetation on the Fleurieu Peninsula,  and it is surrounded by land that has been cleared and is now being used for agriculture,  particularly grazing. 

Probably a messmate stringybark (Eucalyptus obliqua).

There has been a moderate decline in rainfall in the region since the 1970s. Summer in South Australia's  Mediterranean climate-type  climate  with its warm-to-hot dry summers and mild-wet winters means high temperatures, hot north-westerly desert winds,  and increased risk of high intensity fires. 

Climate change projections for the region indicate decreasing rainfall (the winter rainfall  is largely declining),   increasing temperatures, rising sea levels and more severe fire danger days. So more bushfires.

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 Roadside, a sub-theme in the Fleurieuscapes project,  is informed by,  and takes its bearings, from Joyce Evans  intriguing  2013 body of work entitled  Edge of the Road.  The latter  appears to have been forgotten in  our photographic culture ---- sucked into its black hole.  

Roadside emerges from walking the unsealed back country roads in Waitpinga, usually on poodlewalks,  and it is concerned with both the state of side of the road,  the road itself and the  flux of the roadside. 

The picture of  illegal dumping of wet I initially took to be carp by local fishermen on Depledge Rd  in Waitpinga   was made on an early morning poodlewalk. I found out that it is redfin perch  not carp, and it  is slowly rotting away n the side of the road. I am surprised that  not even the local foxes, who clean up all the dead bodies in the bushland,  are  eating  the redfin.  I am glad it's not  carp as it  makes the standard poodles sick if they eat it. 

So much for the assertion that recreational fishermen are  in tune with, and respect,  nature. 

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Adorno argued in History and Freedom that the idea of history as progress in the realisation of freedom was shaken to its very core by the Auschwitz. This catastrophe had its impact on aesthetics in that  the  progressive quality of art could now refer to only such works that undermined the false optimism of the linear  model of historical progress.

One way this undermining took place was the artistic critique of the conventions of the beautiful, glorified by traditional aesthetics as an expression of freedoms,  exemplified by  modernist aesthetic theory of Greenberg.  In this theory  abstraction has often been understood precisely in terms of an aesthetic of the beautiful based on the judgment of taste and  there is  an aesthetic distance from  both popular cultural forms  and the logic of the market.  Art's  logic is an interruption of  tradition through formal innovation or revolutions to prevent its becoming an object of consumption and  ultimately losing its emancipative functions. 

 he critique and undermining of modernist aesthetic theory  was a  negating of  the beautiful form with its proportion, its balance, its unbroken unity, its harmony and its replacement by the rough, shapeless and resistant. Adorno argued in Aesthetic Theory that the sublime was the only aesthetic idea left to modernism (Lenhardt translation, p. 282). 

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A personal context  about the  singular place  (topos) in which we find ourselves and where we live, walk and photograph. 

The picture below is from a granite headland and is a  view of the coastline in  South Australia's southern Fleurieu Peninsula   looking west from the top of a headland  towards Kings Head, Newland Heads and  Cape Jervis.  The  granite headland, which was ice-moulded during the Permian glaciation, is known as Rosetta Head (The Bluff)  or Kongkengguwar  for the first nations  Ramindjeri people.  This region is becoming increasingly developed and framed as a tourist experience.  Rosetta Head itself is currently undergoing a major, long-term tourist upgrade by the Victor Harbor Council.  

The walking trail  along the western coastline from Petrel Cove in the foreground is  now known as the Wild Coast Way and it links up with the southern part of the 1200 kilometre Heysen Trail, which starts at Cape Jervis and ends in the Flinders Ranges.    Suzanne  walked the Heysen Trail over 3 years. In spite of its length it is a very popular walk in South Australia.  

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Two seascapes from the winter of 2022. Both of the pictures are of Encounter Bay  from Rosetta Head (Kongkengguwarr) . This is a headland, 97m above sea level

I pretty much stand in the same location  and I'm looking  in the same direction east by south east --- the camera is basically  looking across  Encounter Bay to the coastline  of the Coorong.  

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I've been re-looking at the film archives on the iMac and I came across  these photos of Kings Head, Waitpinga. I haven't looked at this particular archive in years. I cannot remember when these two photos were made. They were  probably made just before  we moved down to live at Encounter Bay on the southern coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula. 

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A picture from the archives: it is from an early morning poodlewalk in 2022 with Kayla. 

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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.  

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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). 

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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'. 

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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.

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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. 

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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.  

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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. 

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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.

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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.  

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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. 

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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. 

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