Thoughtfactory: Fleurieuscapes

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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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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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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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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This picture was made on an early autumn morning along Franklin Parade in Encounter Bay, Victor Harbor. Franklin Parade  runs close to the beach, and it is where  the old beachside houses from the 20th century are rapidly  being replaced with the larger two story ones. 

I was on a poodlewalk with Kayla along the Encounter Bay beach.  It  was just after sunrise:

Encounter Bay is now my belonging place (home) in the sense that this is where my self belongs. It is where my identity formation as a photographer has formed. A sense of grounding in place provides a solid basis on which to build a sense of identity. This carries with it a sense of responsibility of caring for place that feeds back into, and reinforces, the cohesion of a sense of place. It implies how we as a geographically bounded community collectively learn to live with one another on this earth. 

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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.   

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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.