Thoughtfactory’s Fleurieuscape’s Notebook

Below are two analogue photos from  the on-going, post-studio roadside series. This  is a minor photographic  series that has emerged from the various poodlewalks in and around Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia.

 The site of the first photo  is the southern side of the eastern end of Depledge Rd whilst the site of the second photos is Halls Creek Rd, with  both sites  in  Waitpinga.   Both  photos being  made with a Linhof Technika 70 coupled to  a Linhof 6x9 film back,  and Kodak Porto 160 ASA film in  the late afternoon.   

What could be more mundane  than the roadside of a back country road,  which people treat as a dumping ground for their  illegal dumping? What could be less uninteresting as an artwork? It is about as interesting as Ed Ruscha's serial photographic project entitled Various Small Fires  that presents a sequence of such objects  (matches that are alight, a lighter that’s fired, a lit cigar, a lit cigarette, an ignited gas ring and so  forth).

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 Roadside, a sub-theme in the Fleurieuscapes project,  is informed by,  and takes its bearings, from Joyce Evans  intriguing  2013 body of work entitled  Edge of the Road.  The latter  appears to have been forgotten in  our photographic culture ---- sucked into its black hole.  

Roadside emerges from walking the unsealed back country roads in Waitpinga, usually on poodlewalks,  and it is concerned with both the state of side of the road,  the road itself and the  flux of the roadside. 

The picture of  illegal dumping of wet I initially took to be carp by local fishermen on Depledge Rd  in Waitpinga   was made on an early morning poodlewalk. I found out that it is redfin perch  not carp, and it  is slowly rotting away n the side of the road. I am surprised that  not even the local foxes, who clean up all the dead bodies in the bushland,  are  eating  the redfin.  I am glad it's not  carp as it  makes the standard poodles sick if they eat it. 

So much for the assertion that recreational fishermen are  in tune with, and respect,  nature. 

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Adorno argued in History and Freedom that the idea of history as progress in the realisation of freedom was shaken to its very core by the Auschwitz. This catastrophe had its impact on aesthetics in that  the  progressive quality of art could now refer to only such works that undermined the false optimism of the linear  model of historical progress.

One way this undermining took place was the artistic critique of the conventions of the beautiful, glorified by traditional aesthetics as an expression of freedoms,  exemplified by  modernist aesthetic theory of Greenberg.  In this theory  abstraction has often been understood precisely in terms of an aesthetic of the beautiful based on the judgment of taste and  there is  an aesthetic distance from  both popular cultural forms  and the logic of the market.  Art's  logic is an interruption of  tradition through formal innovation or revolutions to prevent its becoming an object of consumption and  ultimately losing its emancipative functions. 

 he critique and undermining of modernist aesthetic theory  was a  negating of  the beautiful form with its proportion, its balance, its unbroken unity, its harmony and its replacement by the rough, shapeless and resistant. Adorno argued in Aesthetic Theory that the sublime was the only aesthetic idea left to modernism (Lenhardt translation, p. 282). 

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I've been re-looking at the film archives on the iMac and I came across  these photos of Kings Head, Waitpinga. I haven't looked at this particular archive in years. I cannot remember when these two photos were made. They were  probably made just before  we moved down to live at Encounter Bay on the southern coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula. 

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A picture from the archives: it is from an early morning poodlewalk in 2022 with Kayla. 

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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