clouds and sea

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. 

seaside architecture #1

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:

The old summer holiday house has been replaced by a house for people  to permanently  live in.  Victor Harbor is changing. Sea change is starting to  influence the style of architecture. 

a series of small photobooks boxed

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 .

Fleurieuscapes as place not landscape

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.