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).
This view is looking south across farmland to the Inman Valley Rd. As it is from the same location as the previous picture, so there is a linking of snapshots or still images:
On this occasion I was returning from Adelaide and I decided to wander along some back roads rather than the usual Victor Harbor Rd. I took the Hindmarsh Tiers Rd, drove along the Spring Mount Rd which runs off the Hindmarsh Tiers Rd, then along Mount Alma Rd which runs between Spring Mount Rd and the Inman Valley Road. I took the latter back to Victor Harbor.
I recall that Chris Oaten had driven around this area in mid-December 2021 whilst he was trying out the new Fujifilm GFX 50s Mark 11 stills camera. He ventured into the Conservation Park. I haven't walked in this park. I must do so as most of the land in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula is now farmland.
I don't normally do these bird's eye landscapes, as I usually focus on the detail of the land whilst walking on it. On this occasion we are gazing across an agricultural landscape that is the result of colonialism in the sense that it is one that has been produced by a white settler culture. Looking at it we sense a loss of a tree'd, biodiverse land as we recall the remnants of this history now preserved in the small Conservation Park behind us.
This evoking of loss suggests that the photographic image says more than simply being the documentation of the scene, thereby questioning the philosophical position that photography merely reproduces or re-presents the perceptual world in a transparent manner. This is what Deleuze calls a mould of time that privileges a given point of view. The "more than" refers to movement of past and present reflected through the photographic image. The image never represents the real, in the sense of fixing the meaning of an event or scene; rather, it enfolds or implies it. This implying calls us back to our memory of the object; a memory linked to our unconscious and to time.
The mode of memory is always the present and not the past itself, even though all memory in some eradicable sense is dependent on some past event or experience. It is this tenuous fissure between past and present that constitutes memory, making it powerfully alive and distinct from the archive or any other mere system of storage and retrieval.