A picture from the archives: it is from an early morning poodlewalk in 2022 with Kayla.
A brief excursion to Parsons Beach in Waitpinga:
It was an exploratory excursion. I have usually avoided going there because it is a surfing beach with access through the Newland Head Conservation Park. So I cannot take the poodles with me.
I have been taking advantage of the recent overcast weather conditions to photograph in the Spring Mount Conservation Park. The park is small (2.79 square kilometres), consists of mature stringybarks (both Eucalyptus obliqua and E. baxteri), and looks as if it provides a good habitat for the yellow tailed black cockatoo (Calyptorhynchus funereus). We only see these cockatoos in Encounter Bay when they feed on the pine cones in the late summer/early autumn.
The Spring Mount Conservation Park is on a ridge lying between the Inman Valley (in the south) and the Hindmarsh Tiers Valley (in the north). It is in a high rainfall area and I discovered that it can be raining there whilst it is sunny on the Victor Harbor coast, which is just 15- 20 minutes away by car. I have been mostly photographing on the Inman Valley side of the park, as well as walking along the roads along the edge of the park such as the Mt Alma Rd and the Strangeways Rd.
The photo above was made whilst I was walking along Strangeways Rd with the poodles. This road runs east from Mt Alma Rd then south dropping down through farmland in the valley to Sawpit Rd near the Inman Valley Rd. It's a loop. We only walked a couple of kilometres along Strangeways Rd. I have yet to explore the rest of this road in the car. Nor have I walked along the trails within the park.
The landscape b+w picture below of roadside vegetation in Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula is from the archives. It was recently shared with the Melbourne-based Friends of Photography Group (FOPG).
The subtext of landscape art in Australia has been resolutely national; indeed, national identity—the Australianness of Australian art--tacitly assumed the primacy of the nation. I would have thought that the concept of empire would be central, since Australia was part of the British empire. An example would be the early colonial painters such as John Glover, who struggled to reconcile the Australian landscape with the confines of the picturesque, the dominant landscape aesthetic of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The picturesque was in effect the visual language of the colonisers--it highlighted the beauty rather than the hardships of imperial lands, depicting colonial Australia as a land ripe for settlement.
This landscape picture is of a rocky outcrop just west of Kings Head in Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. It was made on an early morning poodlewalk that Kayla and I did. We hadn't been to this location to photograph since the autumn of 2019.
It was an overcast morning in late summer, on the cusp of summer and autumn. It was after a storm had just passed through Victor Harbor a few days earlier. The outcrop is on the Heysen Trail, but it can only be accessed when the tide is low.
I have been slowly photographing the roadside vegetation in my local area on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula with large format cameras--in this case a 5x4 Linhof Technika IV. This kind of slow photography is an attempt to photograph nature whilst avoiding working within the tradition of wilderness photography, which is where a lot of large format photographers in Australia have situated themselves and their work.
The roadside vegetation subject matter is often mundane, ordinary and boring. It requires a lot of scoping to find something that is suitable to photograph, and I basically do the scoping whilst I am on my daily poodle walks along back country roads. These walks allow me to become familiar with the bush and early morning light during the autumn, winter and early spring months.
This particular tree study emerged from my frequent early morning poodle walks along Baum Rd in Waitpinga It's a no exit road that runs between agricultural /grazing fields and it leads to farms and holiday houses along the coastal edge of the Waitpinga Cliffs. This minimal traffic means that this road is ideal for early morning poodle walks.
This picture is from the archives. It was made in 2013 at Kings Head, Waitpinga, just below Kings Beach Retreats. We were still living in Adelaide's CBD at the time, and coming down to Encounter Bay every second weekend.
This photo session incorporated a poodlewalk to Kings Head from the car park at Kings Head Rd and back again. This walk is part of the Heysen Trail to Waitpinga Beach in the Newland Heads Conservation Park, and then to the Trail's starting point at Cape Jervis.
I remembered this image when I uploaded this digital version, which was made 5 years latter as a scoping study. The above picture is a 5x4 scanned colour file that has been converted into black and white. So I had already made the 5x4 picture (along with several medium format versions made in the same year) that I was scoping for in January 2018. My memory was that the previous 5x4 attempt hadn't been successful--people said they didn't think much of the image -- so I felt that I needed to have another go. Hence the digital scoping.
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.
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.