Though the Hindmarsh River doesn't flow during the summer time its estuary is still one of my favourite spots in Victor Harbor:
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 latter is neither land or sea, nature or culture, but partakes of both. This part of the coast is not the beach--it is between Depp's Beach and Kings Beach which are surf beaches with sandy foreshores.
This is a coastal environment where are there few people along the rocks. 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--private property. What happens when the farm is eventually sold?
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.
If my low key approach to the local Fleurieu landscape + seascapes has been one of immersion or absorption within the remnant scrub, country roads, and coastal rocks, then the pictures that emerge from this are of the moments in my ordinary, everyday world. They are pictures of vignettes and moments that are fleeting and often missed.
Then it dawned on me. This is not a project based work. Therein lies the problem I have been having. I have been trying to make it a project based work and it just hasn't worked. So I pushed the work into the archives where it lay forgotten. I felt embarrassed by it.
They are simple pictures of the present moment of things that are modest and humble--eg., seaweed and rocks as in this picture. They are of things that are imperfect, impermanent, incomplete, weathered. These are pictures of the present as the seaweed would have disappeared on the next days walk and the rocks would be covered with seawater.
]]>I realised that my low key approach to the local Fleurieu landscape has been one of immersion or absorption within the remnant scrub. An example of this kind of crafting of the image:
This is at odds with the detached, disembodied neutral observer with an objective and ahistorical vision--what is known as Cartesian perspectivalism----which has been common in, or central to, mainstream photographic discourse. This perspectvalism or visual regime combines the Renaissance notions of perspective with the Cartesian ideas of a disembodied, subjective rationality in which the eye and its gaze are foundationally allied with transparency, operating as the abstract vanishing point of Renaissance perspective. Subjective rationality underpins photography.
]]>I am really struggling with this Fleurieuscapes project.
I am not sure what to do with it, I am not very confident about the project and progress is very slow: I have only got as far as dividing the photo book into two parts---scrub/bush and coastal. I continue to make photos in and around my Fleurieu neighbourhood in Victor Harbor--- these currently emerge out of my scoping whilst on the poodle walks, but I am not doing every much with translating these photos into a photobook.
I also realise that the project has become situated in the landscape, writing and photography nexus, as I accept that the landscape is a kind of text, in that it is 'represented ' in a number of different ways by its inhabitants and artists. The landscape is thus a cultural construct with a certain kind of narrative, which in 20th century Australia, has traditionally been one about national identity. I am comfortable in finding myself working withn the landscape, writing and photography nexus.
Maybe my lack of confidence is because whilst the accounts of our literary and painted landscapes are common and influential, photography has tended to be characterised as a footnote to the history of painting. There is also the difficulties involved that result from the differences between a visual and a written medium--I realise that traditionally words and images are established as not merely different, but antithetical. Thirdly, photographic landscapes seemed to have been caught up in the old genres---the picturesque, the pastoral and the aerial.
Sarah Hill has pointed out that the theoretical complications of the relationship between landscape, writing, and photography have only been explored in a sketchy fashion. Maybe that is why I am floundering with this project/book? What I do know is that I am not really sure how to move away from the old landscape genres---ie., the picturesque, the pastoral and the aerial.
One possibility that I have come across is the pathway suggested by Marion Marrison's 1979 Bonnet Hill Bush series, which consists of a number of photographs of a patch of suburban scrub near where she lived in Tasmania. As Martin Jolly observes:
"Marrison found a microcosmic Australia literally in her own backyard. And rather than imposing a geometry on it, she finds a geometry within it, visually curating the fallen trunks and branches into an order which registers her own personal point of view, and her own presence as an aesthetic appreciator immersed in the environment — however modestly scaled."
The series takes the viewer deep inside the scrub with the camera focused on the ground, picking out fragments of fallen branches, twigs and foliage. So there is no horizon line or clear sense of scale.
]]>Sadly, a lot of Australia's agricultural landscapes are in the grip of a slow death. It's not just the clear felling of the woodlands or the loss of life, that is species (plants and animals) extinction either. There is also drastic loss in life support systems.
The plagues of rabbits (introduced to the continent with the first fleet) invaded the rangelands, eating all the vegetation and leaving the soils exposed to wind and rain. Overgrazing by cattle and sheep, particularly during periods of drought, exacerbated problems; in areas where rabbits never flourished, cattle seem to have been equally effective in denuding the country.
Much of the one quarter of Australia that is not rangelands is being intensively farmed. There is salinity, in many places, and acidity in others, both of which are devastating this farm land.
]]>This photo is made from an ecological perspective on the landscapes that have been produced by the economic development of settler capitalism. Today there is only scattered remnant vegetation left from the clearance for agricultural production in the Fleurieu Peninsula. It's not a pretty picture.
The photo of an intimate landscape --dead roadside vegetation-- is the opposite of a nostalgic picture of a cosy, rural life to a harmonious settlement that has its roots in the yeoman tradition in the form of soldier settlements. The state government, as a promoter of economic development, in the early 20th century was also the architect of a desired cultural landscape and social class that emphasised the virtues of small-scale family owned and operated yeoman farms.
The ‘ pioneer legend’---which saw white settlement as a battle to win the land, in which humans were evenly pitted against nature---is now a form of myth making, given the emergence of agri-businesses and the family farm becoming all but obsolete. The pioneer idea, in pitting settlers against the land was not only fruitless, in leading to the ruin of the settlers, but self-defeating in ultimately ruining the land itself.
]]>The picture below is from a 2015 autumn photoshoot at Sellicks Beach, a southern coastal beach in Adelaide:
Photographing the coast is an example of how photography has appropriated the language of painting---in this case the landscape, in which nature is seen for its own sake. The pictorial representation of the landscape in painting emerges in the 17th century in Europe and reaches its peak in nineteenth century with Romanticism. The genre 'landscape' is a way of seeing and there are different views of the land--eg., those of the aboriginal people, white settlers, tourists etc.
]]>The settler's clearing of the Australian landscape during the white settlement made this land the white man’s. What is forgotten is the terrible violence meted out to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders at – and after – white settlement. There is a refusal, eg., by the Australian War Memorial, to tell the story of the violence that raged across the Australian colonial frontier after British invasion and occupation in 1788. That the violence took the form of a frontier war is often denied.
The ‘clearing’ of the landscape by the first European settlers forced Indigenous people off their traditional lands and into small Christian missions and government reserves.
What is noticeable about this landscape is the contemporary absence of Australian Aboriginal culture within the Australian landscape and the impact of European colonisation. You wouldn't know the history from looking at the pasture land and the scrubland.
The landscape had long been the neglected poor cousin in Australian photography. Landscape photography has remained stagnant since the 1950s, cycling through the same formats of the picturesque, the sublime, the pastoral and the aerial.
It's central historical function, established from painting, is that of being the site where issues of Australian identity were debated. These debates heated up in the 1970s with the political resurgence of the Left; feminism; the resurgence of Aboriginal activism; the impacts of globalization on regional identities; the beginnings of a shift in focus from Europe and America to Asia; and the beginnings of the modern Green movement's campaigns to save the wilderness. For instance we understand the significance of the Tasmanian wilderness through all the photographs of it by Olegas Truchanas and Peter Dombrovskis.
]]>The dominant landscape aesthetic in Australia has been the picturesque. Traditionally, in Australia, this views the earth as raw material of a novel landscape for asethetic appreciation of English colonialist.
According to William Gilpin in Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Pictureque Travel; and On the Art of Sketching Landscapes the picturesque is situated between the beautiful and the sublime. Its codes specify that the one centre of interest in the picture should be in the middle ground; the foreground occupies a subsidiary function that introduces the leading subject; a clear planar division to establish the illusion of depth; a variety of contrast rather than smoothness; and a point of view that allows the framing of a limited scene rather than an endless expanse.
If nature exists primarily for the pleasure of the viewer, then the picturesque in Australia was a way of according the land an aesthetic value that is also imbricated with the land's economic value. The colonising power adapted the picturesque with the profitable: the colonists had in mind good pasture for sheep and cattle and the suitable of the land for occupation of a European power and its agriculture.
In the colonial picturesque in settler Australia the economic pressures of agruclture and aesthetic conventions are reconciled. It excluded any sign of the aboriginal population, helped to perpetuate the fiction of terra nullius, and helped to establish the divide between the barbarism of the Aborigines and the civilization of settler Australia.
In Native to Nation: Disciplining Landscapes and Bodies in Australia Allaine Cerwonka says that the production of the picturesque landscape was an important means by which political and social identity was constructed in white colonial Australia.
]]>I introduced the term 'altered landscapes' in an earlier post when mentioning that the landscape of the Fleuriu Peninsula has been extensively cleared so that it could become productive farming country.
Altered landscapes, in the art historical context, refers to the influential 1975 exhibition at the George Eastman House in Rochester New York entitled New Topgraphics: Photographs of a Man Altered Landscape. It was curated by William Jenkins and included Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore and Henry Wessel Jr.
In the catalogue Jenkins defined the common denominator of the show as "a problem of style" "stylistic anonymity", an alleged absence of style with a strong claim for objectivity and emotional neutrality. He says:
It must be made clear that “New Topographics” is not an attempt to validate one category of pictures to the exclusion of others. As individuals the photographers take great pains to prevent the slightest trace of judgment of opinion from entering their work . . . This viewpoint, which extends throughout the exhibition, is anthropological rather than critical, scientific rather than artistic. The exhibition, as an entity separate from the photographers, will hopefully carry the same non-judgmental connotation as the pictures which comprise it. If “New Topographics has a central purpose it is simply to postulate, at least for the time being, what it means to make a documentary photograph.
At the time this collection of mostly black and white photographs by ten photographers (only Stephen Shore photographed in colour) was interpreted as a deadpan documentation of the contemporary banal urbanscape, and it was placed in opposition to the monumental photography of nature along the lines of Ansel Adams that elevated the natural, the elemental and the idealized.
It was deemed to be an aesthetic of the banal that was made by machines. Thus the old modernist view of photography as the anti-aesthetic medium par exellence, in virtue of its mechanical nature and casual basis, returns. Modernism's notion of a disinterested and self-sufficient art was premised on positivism--on Wittgenstein's logical positivism and langiuage philosophy.
In spite of the inclusion of Bernd and Hilla Becher, then teaching at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Germany), the 'deadpan documentation' of the suburban sprawl of motels, parking lots, neon signs shops, industrial buildings, and tract houses was linked back to the 19th century topographic work of Timothy O'Sullivan (old topographics?) rather than to Walker Evans. Jenkins mentioned Edward Ruscha's work, especially the numerous artist books (“26 Gasoline Stations” (1962), “Various Small Fires” (1964), “34 Parking Lots” (1967), etc.) that he self-published in the 1960s as one of the inspirations for the exhibition.
What was actually offered, of course, was more of a particular interpretation of the American western landscape than topographics per se. The Bechers understood the latter in terms of multiple photographs of the same objects that are displayed in grids. The images of structures with similar functions are displayed side by side to invite viewers to compare their forms and designs based on function, regional idiosyncrasies, or the age of the structures.
Tthe title of Twentysix Gasoline Stations was selected in advance of the photographs and Ruscha followed a predetermined route in his car on Route 66 and systematically recorded just the gas stations in a deadpan way. The instruction, or rule governed performance, (record 26 gasoline stations on Route 6) can be understood as evading authorial or artistic agency and generating chance operations. Ruscha's understanding of photography --the amateur snapshot's recoding of just facts brings together authorial abnegration, indexicality and openenss to chance. For all of Jenkin's curatorial gesture to Ed Ruscha and conceptual art, it was only Lewis Blatz and the Bechers themselves who worked in a conceptual grid like way.
It was an interpretation of the contemporary American urbanscape as a site for critical cultural inquiry and a rethinking of the landscape tradition; one that expressed the growing unease about how the natural landscape was being eroded and damaged by industrial development and the spread of cities. The significance of this mode of picture making is that it offered a way for photographers to represent the "landscape" without the notions of the picturesque or the sublime.
]]>Brian O’Doherty’s “Inside the White Cube”, which was originally published as a series of three articles in Artforum in 1976, and then subsequently collected in a book of the same name, has a simple but powerful argument about exhibitions spaces in art galleries in a world where our experience is governed by pictures. Pictures in newspapers and magazines, on television and in the cinema.
O'Doherty argued that the familiar gallery space is not a neutral container, but a historical construct. Furthermore, it is an aesthetic object in and of itself. The ideal form of the white cube that modernism developed for the gallery space is inseparable from the artworks exhibited inside it. Indeed, the white cube not only conditions, but also overpowers the artworks themselves in its shift from placing content within a context to making the context itself the content.
The white cube is conceived as a place free of context, where time and social space are thought to be excluded from the experience of artworks. It is only through the apparent neutrality of appearing outside of daily life and politics that the works within the white cube can appear to be self-contained—only by being freed from historical time can they attain their aura of timelessness.
The white cube establishes a crucial dichotomy between that which is to be kept outside (the social and the political) and that which is inside (the staying value of art). The gallery space is saturated with ideology. The white cube was constructed in order to give the artworks a timeless quality (and thus, lasting value) in both an economic and a political sense. It was a space for the immortality of a certain class's cultural values, as well as a staging ground for objects of sound economic investment for possible buyers.
The task of critical art becomes one of reflecting upon and restaging this space. This is what happened in the 1970s. Firstly, there was the postmodern critique of the art gallery system by Douglas Crimp in his On The Museum's Ruins, a collection of essays originally published in Parachute and October in the 1980s. In the lead essay Crimp argued that the art gallery or museum is an enclosure of decaying and dead objects.
Secondly, photography in the 1980s concerned itself with issues around representation, ideology, truth and reality. It was a part of both the questioning of documentary photography's value as a witness to history and the analyses of the impact of photography on visual art.
Walter Benjamin in his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction essay said that the primary question was not whether photography was art, but whether the invention of photography had transformed thevery nature of art. Few, however, had taken seriously photography's power to transform visual art--ie., painting.
For modernists, it was painting that sets the agenda for post-war art, and for John Szarkowski at MOMA, that meant an art stripped of its extraneous features can be made from the elementary properties of its medium. That meant to make art from, and about, art. Hence the modernist challenge to transform photography into painting.
In his On The Museum's Ruins essay however, Crimp used the photographs of Robert Rauschenberg to argue that photography began to conspire with painting in its own destruction. The notions of originality, authenticity and aura that are essential to the ordered discourse of the modernist art gallery are undermined by the techniques of quotation, repetition, excerptation and confiscation of already existing images.
Though the presentation of visual art in the white cube continues to exist---and it is still the dominant mode of presentation-- different spaces have been opened up. These allow for other kinds of relationships between the art work, the space and the viewer; one in which art and life are reconnected, and history is included.
The backlash to postmodernism came in the 1990s in the form of a reaction against theory ---a backlash to questions about language, the structure of signification, subjectivity and power. This backlash the influence of European philosophy (Jacques Derrida) and cultural theorists like Walter Benjamin --the culture wars -- unseated the critic in the name of the beauty and freedom of art.
The conservative's desire was to shoot down the idea that philosophy-- or more specifically the dreaded deconstruction of the theorists--- can ever tell us anything about the visual arts. Their rhetoric is that the humanities have been taken over by the left and they that tear up the visual arts (and literature) and reassemble it to say what they think it says.
In doing so they resist the physical and aesthetic pleasures of the image (and the text) and the individual's experience of art. Our emotional response to artworks---aesthetic experience---is what matters.
]]>I've started reading Jane Hylton's The Painted Coast: Views of the Fleurieu Peninsula in order to gain a sense of the visual history of this part of South Australia from the 1840s to the present. It's a catalogue of an exhibition of 200 images held at the Art Gallery of the South Australia in Adelaide in the 1990s.
The strength of this text is that it is an archive of our cultural memory of this region in a global world. The art gallery is functioning both as a temple and as an educational institution in representing the region to itself and others.
Artists in the text are reduced to painters and there is no exploration of the interrelationship between photography and painting or painting and film. Painting exists in its own universe, even though most of the images produced of the Fleurieu Peninsula in our image based culture would now be digital photographs.
The art historical curator's argument is that the movement of this local landscape tradition comes from genius painters influencing other painters to produce their masterpieces.The art gallery is a refuge of a hermetically sealed art, and the criterion for determining the order of aesthetic objects throughout the modernist era was the "self-evident" quality of masterpieces.
This erasure of photography is ironic given the demise of painting arguments about painting's exhaustion that were circulating through the art institution in the 1980s. Painting as a central mode of modernist practice was also radically displaced in the 1960s by what has come to be called conceptual art, and also by the increasing engagement with lens-based media, photography video, and ultimately digital technologies.One of the things that Conceptual Art in the 1960s attempted was the dismantling of the hierarchy of media according to which painting (sculpture trailing slightly behind) is assumed inherently superior to, most notably, photography.
Even though Hylton was a curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia photography and film play no role in this art history of the Fleurieu Peninsula. It's only the work of the painters that matter, and it is assumed that the other visual media had no influence on what and how they painted. Or if it did it is insignificant.
This is art history narrowly defined and behind it sits the institutional authority of the art gallery.This holds that painting estsblishes the visual and intellectual visual frame and that photography can be respectable only insofar as it repeats or rehearses the pictorial strategies of painting.
This traditional art history of pictures reduces our visual culture to painting, and it rejects the idea that in the late 20th centry painting has become one kind of image amongst many including prints, photography, film, video, and television or televisuality. There is a sense that art history has to keep at bay the new media to defend its traditional terrain and to protect its boundaries. It is defensive because there is no re-thinking of the traditional frame of art history that is being deployed by Hylton.
I appreciate that there was a return to expressionist painting in the 1980s but this post conceptual-period also witnessed the emergence of photographic works of large scale and in colour (eg., Jeff Wall, Andreas Gurskey, Thomas Ruff, Gregory Crewdson) in the art institution. The shift is towards producing big pictures whether in photography or paint and it places the viewer in front of a single large, recognizable picture that is intelligible at first glance. The big picture has visual authority.
Hence there are good grounds to talk in terms of the crisis of the art gallery and to call into question the powerful fiction that presents art as a coherent system and art history as its ideal order. Photography disrupted modernism's discourse on originality and the irreducibility --the aura ---of the unique object, forming a faultline along which the sensibility of postmodernism began to coalesce.
However, the modernist fetsh of art has, to a large extent, transformed photography from a subversive element within modernism to yet another avante-garde strategy in the art institution.
]]>Some of my rock studies of the rockfaces of the granite coastline west of Victor Harbor move towards abstraction have as their reference point the pictures taken by Charles Bayliss of the Jenolan Caves in NSW in the 1880s.
I know very little about the avant garde and modernist abstraction in mid-20th century Adelaide in both photography and painting. It has been widely assumed that photography was about representation; no matter how off-register, its subject matter was shaped by our sense of objective reality.Yet abstraction has been intrinsic to photograph from its beginning with Henry Fox Talbot--eg., the direct capture of light without a camera (Laszlo Moholy-Nagy photograms), digital sampling found images, radical cropping, and various deliberate destablizations of photographic reference.
However, Helen Ennis in the 'Introduction' to her Photography and Australia says that:
The one constant in photographic practice in Australia is so striking it warrants identification at the start--the orientation towards realism. Those using photogrpahy in Australia have long been preoccupied with the physical, material aspects of life rather than its metaphysical or spiritual dimension. Consequently, there is a weightiness to the great majority of Australian photographs---overwhelming they are of 'things', including actions and events, which have a concrete reality and verifiable independent existence. ...For most of the twentieth centry, inward looking-looking approaches, whether symbolist, surrealist, or abstract, never really took hold.
It is strange that Ennis equates abstraction with inward looking, spiritual, metaphsyical, rather than objective form, light, tone, colour given the hegemony of modernist in the art insitution.
My art history understanding is that the modernist abstraction movement in painting emeged in Sydney with Ralph Balson and Grace Cowley etc in the 1930s. Sydney was metropolitan, Adelaide was provincal whilst Melbourne rejected abstraction for figurative painting e.g., John Brack.
Bernard Smith in his Australian Painting (I have the 2nd Edition) does say that the contemporary art movement in Adelaide in the 1950s included a strand of abstract expressionism due to the arrival of migrant artists from central Europe, such as Wladyslaw Dutkiewicz and Ludwig Dutkiewicz, who lived and worked in Adelaide for the rest of their lives.
But there are no images of their work in Smith's seminal text. His argument is that good art does not arrive from the European messengers setting foot in the country, but from the provincal visual tradition being transformed by the innovations from overseas.
It [the finest art] has arisen not as the immediate point of impact of the novel metropolitan style upon the slower moving provinvcal style, but latter, when the innovation has found a creative point of accommodation with the sluggish provincal tradition which, though out of date by the standards of its metropolitan sources, has put down its roots in the environment of the country. (p.334)
The inference is that nothing much happened in Adelaide that was of interest to the modern art movement in Australia. Sydney became metropolitan--it drew its creative energies and dynamism from within itself---whilst Adelaide remained a cultural province with its sluggish and conservative visual arts. Adelaide, as a cultural backwater, looked to Sydney for innovation and new styles.
Although people from Adelaide use their 4 wheel drives to go to Victor Harbor to escape their daily work routines and relax in nature, the landscape around the coastline is an altered landscape. Apart from the Deep Creek Conservation Park in the south west corner of the Fleurieu Peninsula the landscape is farming country.
The native bush or scrub has been cleared for the grazing of sheep and cattle. The landscape has a bare or denuded look. It is stripped, stark country.
There is very little native bush left outside the conservation parks. Most of what is left is on the side of the unsealed back country roads, or along the various creek beds that run through private property.
Remnant roadside vegetation is a distinctive feature of rural environments in southern Australia and there is ongoing and incremental degradation of this vegetation, often due to illegal clearance. Roadside vegetation is in a general state of decline throughout South Australia and it is increasingly uncommon to find roadsides that contain high quality remnant native vegetation.
If roadside vegetation is often the only remaining original vegetation in cleared landscapes, then this may bethe only hoe for soem species in that locality. There is not enough to form a linear habitat network for vertebrates and invertebrates.
]]>In her Other histories: photography and Australia essay Helen Ennis says that up to the late 1960s a strict hierarchy operated in art history in Australia. In this hierarchy the traditional art forms of painting, and to a lesser degree sculpture, were regarded as most important, followed by drawing and printmaking. Art photography was mostly confined to a medium specific realm, rarely penetrating the larger art world. It occupied a peripheral position in relation to mainstream art practice in the art institution.
Moreover, as Geoffrey Batchen, points in his essay ‘Australian made’, in his Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History, Australia's photographic history is:
positioned, when it is thought of it all, as no more than a supplement to The History of Photography as we have come to know it through Helmut Gersheim and Beaumont Newhall and all their more recent followers. This establishment history, already circumscribed by its monotonous quest for orginality, priority, and the heights of artistic sensibilty, has by and large confined its attention to developments in France and Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States in the twentieth. As a consequence, no photographs from Australia are featured in its hallowed lineup of masterworks.
Since the scholarly history of Australian photographic tradition was only constructed in the 1980s Australian art photographers (photography as 'self-expression') took their bearings from American art photography in the 1960 and 1970s.
The regional or Australian history of art photographic that emerged late in the 1980s was premised on the modernist, essentialist approach championed by Szarkowski and others with its conventions and categories of artistic genius, an oeuvre, innovation, technical excellence, period style and rarity. Modernist formalism ruled.
Gael Newton in her Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988 was an attempt to establish some sort of local artistic tradition for the medium. The above categories were simplified into ‘pictorial power’ and ‘artistic merit’ and the text was premised on the search for exceptional images produced by a few clebrated photographers. It was organized into photographic art history's stylistic categories of pictorialism, modernism, documentary and postmodernism.
Given this history of our visual culture both the representation of the landscape in Australian visual culture and the visual language of that tradition have been established by painting and the books on painting by art historians. In order to see how the Fleurieu Peninsula has been visually represented in the past we need to turn to the modernist painters of the 1940s-1960s, such as Dorrit Black, James Cant, Kathleen Sauerbier and Dora Chapman.
The painter that is the most significant for me is James Cant's representations of the local bush and scrub around Aldinga and Willunga. Less important is Lee Friedlander's interesting photographs of trees and shrubs in the US are not as crucial, as these do not refer to this particular place. Nor did I know about the colonial photography produced in the nineteenth century as the first South Australian survey history of photography, A Century in Focus: South Australian Photography 1840s-1940s by Julie Robertson and Maria Zaagla, was not produced until 2007.
]]>Often it is the detail in the landscape along the coastline of Victor Harbor that is significant. It is not the big panorama images or the picturesque, which has been absorbed by the tourist aesthetic to sell the tourist product for discerrning consumers seeking a quality experience.
But it is difficult to represent the details in terms of the identity of the landscape: what we have is ordinariness and familiarity or the simple being there of particular objects in the material world but which do appear strange. They are near but far.
We are familiar with the landscape from being in it, but though it is ordinary, nondescript and banal it also eludes us and slips away from us. What eludes us is the non-identical. It doesn't fit our comfortable categories and it slips away from them.
The image becomes enigmaticas they have the duality of being determinate and indeterminate.They become questions marks because of their unfamiliarity and we apprehend them apart from the dominate synthesizing function of our everyday categories.
The way or the path is into the "non-identity" between "concept and object, mind and matter, the individual and nature". The landscape, in contrast to philosophy, pa foregrounds the "primacy of the object" over thought and the "non-identity" between concept and object. Modern philosophy, in contrast, has privileged thought and its concepts and, as a result, philosophy has not done justice to that in the object which does not fit under the rigid classifying gaze of our concepts.
If the recognition of conceptual limits necessarily leads to conceptual attempts to overcome them, then the non-identical resists this. The landscape detail in recognizing the limitations to our conceptual understanding and the irreducibility of objects to our concepts, assists the non-identical against the idenity represented by the static systems of concepts embodied in the tourist aesthetic.
In a world of becoming the non-identical lets us recognize the limitations to conceptual understanding, the dependence of our concepts upon objects, and the irreducibility of objects to our concepts. What is left behind by the concept is not an inaccessible and indefinable X as it represents a turn to our embodied existence in the world.
This path here is away from the particular object to an experience of the object standing in a pattern of relations to other particulars---a historically sedimented constellation.
]]>My first photographs during my early visits to the seaside town of Victor Harbor in South Australia were of the granite rocks that helped form the foreshore between Rosetta Head and Kings Head. It was a favourite place to walk with the dogs when I was holiday in on the coast and I started to take the odd snap.
Eventually I returned without the dogs to take photos of the individual rocks that I'd seen whilst on the walks; more often than not I was working with slow film, a medium format camera, tripod and longish exposures. I was operating with already formed picturesque images in my head from the local tourism advertisments of natural scenery.
I slowly shifted away from a moody romantic style of bird's eye views of the coastline with dark foreboding skies---the sublime--- to the detail of the coastalscape. I became very aware of the light during the day, and I gained a local knowledge of when was the best time to photograph that particular part of the coastline and in what season.
I wasn't thinking in terms of a philosophy of nature, mythic landscapes, or the memories of past landscapes of my childhood in New Zealand. Nor did the painters of the sublime in landscape --- JMW Turner, Albert Bierstadt, Caspar David Friedrich, John Martin or Eugene Von Guérard --- have much impact. I had no knowledge of the importance of Claude Lorraine's topographical representations of the natural wold for landscape painting: namely, the way the landscape was organized along three planes: a background with undefined details; a darkened foreground and a strongly lit middle gound with a framing device (trees o frsides of mountainss) designed to draw the viewers attention to the highlighted middle distance.
Though I was aware of some of the work about the Fleurieu Peninsula done by the early South Australian modernist painters, I pretty much photographed what was in front of me. It was that basic and naive. I had no idea of the eighteenth century's aesthetic categories of the beautiful and the sublime, or how the picturesque was a hybrid category that mediated the other two in order to represent those objects that were rough to be beautiful and too small to be terrifying.
It was the kitschy tourist postcards in the gift shops and news agents, which resonated with my pre-formed image, that I was reacting to. What eventuated was a more classical modernist photographic approach, as the photography became a training ground in terms of composition of the picture, texture, tone, lighting, colour and the overall design of the image.
The Fleuieu Peninsula has an interesting coastline and it's largely been ignored, apart from the standard heavily saturated tourist images in the postcards, calenders and the more popular photographic books about the Australian landscape. This is the tourist aesthetic designed as guides for travellers, with their picturesque conventions that shape the way tourists can appreciate the landscape and promise certain experiences of natural beauty. 
The pictureque constructs the landscape as scenery: you stop off at certain points in your journey to admire the view of the rugged contours of wild nature. This is done from a specific viewpoint that encourages the tourist to take a photo according to certain aesthetic critiera related to the proportioning middle distance, planar recession, graduated light and dark areas. It is a reaction to the rigid geometery of the cities and urban settlement and provides a way to perveive visual qualities in nature.
The City of Victor Harbor, for instance, packaged itself as a tourist town--as a living gallery of landscape pictures--and this packaging is a part of our mass visual culture. This place branding accepts a landscape that had been permanently transformed by farming, railways and roads and it highlights what is eye pleasing and spiritually fulfilling. The new pictureque mapped what was considered to be painterly--a visual romanticism that functioned as a practical aethetic of beauty for tourists and photographers.
The new picturesque is controlled by the tourism industry and it functioned to reconcile people with the seaside world around them. It markets the landscape as promising an experience of nature that is evocative, inspiring and emotionally pleasing. The promise of beauty and variety is similar to the same kind of experience sought by the romantic travellers of the eighteenth century.
The local photographers who live and work in the Fleurieu Peninsula, and who are producing images for postcards, calendars and other promotional material, are basically producing images of what they believe the tourists to the region imagine they want to see. In doing so they are perpeturating the dominant visual conventions of the picturesque constructed in the eighteenth century Britain, and repoduced over time in Australia within the landscape tradition.
They continue to express the pictureques convention of containing the wild, irregular and rugged characteristics of nature within a refined and perfected form so that it could be consumed and appreciated by tourists and locals in a comfortable and controlled way.
]]>Wilderness photography and its aesthetics of wild places is not suitable approach to photographing Victor Harbor and the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. It forces the need to rethink wilderness as an island in sea of urban-industrial modernity; as the last place where industrial capitalism has not fully destroyed the earth.
The coastal town is situated on the cusp of land and sea with a lot of the landscape along the coastline transformed into farmland. Part of this (dairy) farmland is now being sold off for housing. Victor Harbor and the other towns on the coast are altered landscapes; not wild places, such as the south-west Tasmanian wildernesss photographed by Peter Dombrovskis.
In an exhibition at the Braemer Galley entitled Different Ways of looking at our World Mike Stacey, Len Metcalf and Ian Brown, in a common statement, state that their common conception of wilderness photography emerges from:
much of their life engrossed in the natural world, bushwalking, rockclimbing, skiing, mountaineering, wandering… and seeing. Their images are grounded in an intimacy with nature that emerges through long experience, up close and slow with the bush, the birds and the rocks, the wind, the water. [They] try to capture the grandeur and nuance of nature, selecting subjects of power and subtlety from what, at first glance, can be an overwhelming abundance of subject matter. By immersing themselves calmly in a place, they seek the spiritual in nature, extending the notion of beauty into the ethereal; the true essence of what surrounds us.
This kind of wilderness photography goes beyond natural beauty and unique artistic vision to the transcendental---to the spiritual and the ethereal as the essence of natural beauty and natural being. Len Metcalf states this explicitly:
As a conservationist I believe that mother nature is the creative and controlling primary force in the universe. While creating my art in magical locations I am reminded of the interconnectedness of our world. ....Currently the direction of my work strives to move away from the current ‘landscape photographer’ status quo, in an attempt to discover a Modern Australian Landscape Style. One where the artwork is timeless, unique and the photographs illustrate the spiritual within nature. I search for a unique vision in my search for significant form.
The roots of this philosophy of nature are in Romanticism and its deism and sense of the sublime. Romanticism's concept of the sublime is grounded in those wild places that inspire awe and fear, and its enthusiasm is for the strange, remote, primitive and the mysterious. Wilderness, as a landscape where the supernatural lay just beneath the surface, was expressed in the asthetics of the sublime.
In Australia wilderness became uniquely Australian---wilderness had no counterpart in the Old World-- and it became a cultural and moral resource that formed the basis for national self-esteem in oppostion to the provinciality of Australia compared to the history and tradition of Europe. It was in the wildness of its nature that Australia was unmatched. Hence the tight fit between the landscape traditon and nationality expressed in the Heidleberg School.
Although Victor Harbor was a refuge from the anxieties and hollowness of society and making money in Adelaide it was civilization, given the way that its history of whaling, pioneering, farming, and seaside holday resort was premised on the conquest of nature. So an art photography of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula needs to explore both the landscape and the built urbanscape, and the way that these have been historically transformed.
Though some of the rhizomatic roots of this work are located with the American version of the topographic movement the cultural tradtions of wilderness remain important to us because they require us to critically examine what kind of marks we humans want to leave on the natural world. The photography in this book is one informed by environmentalism.
]]>Our connection to Victor Harbor as a place, as opposed to a tourist location, came with the decision by Suzanne's parents-- Bruce and Marjorie Heath---to retire to this region of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula from Melbourne.
Suzanne's parents built their retirement house near Rosetta Head, and though Bruce, died in 1980 just after the house was built, Marjorie lived in the house until her death in 1997. Both Bruce and Marjorie loved the local landscape of the Fleurieu Peninsula. This place--it was bounded by Aldinga, Kangaroo Island, and lakes Alexandrina and Albert near the mouth of the River Murray---became their home.
Gary meet Suzanne in 1993 and we used to visit Marjorie on weekends and public holidays. Whilst staying at Solway Cresent Gary started taking photographs of the local landscape.These were in the pre-digital days of film cameras when all the work--processing and printing --- was done by the professional photography labs.
Suzanne and her sister Barbara inherited the house when Marjorie died, and Suzanne bought Barbara out, primarly because Suzanne lived in Adelaide whilst Barbara lived in Brisbane. Suzanne and Gary continued to visit on weekends and holidays.
Solway Cresent became a weekender. Over the next decade Victor Harbor became a place, a home away from the inner city apartment in Adelaide's CBD and the world of work. The region became a place in that we developed a sense of human attachment and belonging.
The photography became an expression of our sense of place, a way of giving meaning to this geographic space. We started to realize that the landscape of the Fleurieu Peninsula had its own identity. The local painters exhibiting in the local art galleries were pre-modernist in that their paintings were of gum tree a la Hans Heysen or Horace Hurtle Trenerry, rural cottages, or picturesque seascapes with their blue sky and sea.
Modernism was not solely an urban phenopmenon as there the modernist painters of the Fleurieu Peninsula such as Dorrit Black, Dora Chapman and James Cant in the 1940's -1970s. The local visual art scene was either unaware of, or had fogotten, this body of work, or the regional culture was indifferent to abstraction and the abstract expressionist representations of the locality. What was missing was Black's emphasis on the form of the landscape; Cant's closely observed paintings of the undergrowth and minutia of the Australian bush or scrub; Chapman's abstractions of eucalepts; or the surrealism of Ivor Francis.
]]>I've been thinking about doing a DIY book about my local seaside neighbourhood at Victor Harbor, South Australia for some time now. We've been coming down to the weekender from Adelaide regularly---it's been 15 years I think. I've been taking photos here and around the Fleurieu Peninsula for a number of years.
Up to now I've been content to publish some of the photos on my Flickr stream, on my photoblog, Rhizomes1, and on poodlewalks, my visual diary. Now I fell the need to begin to select the Victor Harbor photographs into some kind of project.
I'm going to begin by using the Posterous micro publishing platform to publish the images and text that would then form the raw material for the book. I would then have something on the desktop to work with, as opposed to it just being an idea in my head. The result would be a first draft, as it were.
I've been wanting to make the shift to DIY publishing for some time, but I've never found a way to cull the visual material for the book from what I am taking. So Posterous is being used to help me address the culling problem.
I understand that Independent publishing is flourishing thanks to on-demand printing. The trend to make, edit, design and produce your own photobook appears to have become an underground phenomenon in our digital world.
One advantage of the DIY book is that it enable the art photographer to sidestep the exhibition space of the art gallery system, which has become increasingly closed as the digital revolution transforms our visual culture. Its a reworking of the old idea of Salon de Refusés. 