Thoughtfactory: Fleurieuscapes

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.

But what kind? I don't really know. Therein lies a problem, which  I will have to confront sometime in the future. So the book will be designed as a process of puttintg it together. 

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'm not that  interested in making money by selling lots of books. That's a dream. So too is making the photobook as an art object in the Japanese tradition of Kohei Sugiura.  I'm more interested in putting together a well packaged and interesting book, and  acquiring the digital skills and knowledge from dong so.  

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.