In this post in 2016 I mentioned that I had started to work on the Bowden Archives and Other Marginalia book. In two other posts in 2017 about the Adelaide Art Photographers 1970-2000 book, I indicated that a few of my archival non-Bowden photos would form a portfolio in the book. That book has now been published by Moon Arrow Press in Adelaide.
This leaves the Bowden Archives and Other Marginalia project to be completed as a book. It will have 3 sections. The first one is on street photography in Melbourne (circa 1977-9) after I’d finishing studying at the Photography Studies College and snapshots in Adelaide. The middle section will consist of the Bowden photographs. The third section includes photographs made on various road trips around and outside of Adelaide.
The picture below would be part of the third section, if it makes the cut:
I have pulled the Bowden project from being published by Wakefield Press, who will now be publishing the Tasmanian Elegies project. The Bowden Archives and Other Marginalia book will be published by Moon Arrow Press in 2021.
topographics
In a previous post on this archival blog I had mentioned my shift from street photography to topographics during the 1980s. This shift emerged whilst I was photographing around Osborne, Gillman and Outer Harbor along the Port River estuary on the Le Fevre Peninsula.
This is an example of my topographic approach to industrial type urbanscapes—a wasteland, if you like– that was made in the 1980s:
Another version of the topographical approach to this wasteland or ravaged landscape that was made in the same photo-session is here.
The shift from street photography to topographics is how I have structured my portfolio in the Adelaide Photography 1970-2000 book, which is to be published by Moon Arrow Press in 2019. It is part of the independent photobook movement. Continue reading
starting over again
This was one the first colour photographs that I made after my return to photography in the 1990s. I had stopped making photos whilst I was doing my PhD in philosophy at Flinders University of South Australia. I started the doctorate in the late 1980s and finished the PhD around 1998, then started to work as an academic on a casual basis. During the 1990s Suzanne, Fichte and I would sometimes go down to Victor Harbor on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula coast on the weekends to stay with Suzanne’s mother (Majorie Heath) at her place in Solway Crescent.
This photos is representation of the granite coast west of Petrel Cove and east of Dep’s Beach at Victor Harbor. It was made with my Linhof Technika 70 using a 6×7 film back. This modest and intermittent photographic restart would have been around the mid 199os before Majorie Heath died in 1997.
I had put all my large format cameras in a cupboard, stopped using black and white film for medium format, and only used b+w for 35m until I lost the Leica M4. I was inching back to photography using the old Linhof, a camera, which I am still using over 20 years latter. I was impressed by the coast, thought that it was an interesting location, and a good spot to pick up the pieces and make a modest return to photography. Continue reading
The Adelaide Photography 1970-2000 book begins
Today I started work in a rather low key way on the Adelaide Photography 1970-2000 book that Adam Dutkiewicz and I will work on together after he finishes Volume 2 of A Visual History: the Royal South Australian Society of Arts 1856-2016. The Adelaide Photography book is to be published by Moon Arrow Press, and hopefully, if all goes well with the contributions from the Adelaide art photographers in this period it will be published in late 2018. The book builds on the Abstract Photography: Re-evaluating Visual Poetics in Australian Modernism and Contemporary Practice book that Adam and I published in 2016.
Low key here means that I contacted several people to see if they were interested in their work being a part of the project; and secondly, I have started to read some tough going texts on aesthetics that I’d borrowed from the Flinders University of South Australia’s Library to help me write an essay on the aesthetics of art photography for the book. The questions I am addressing in the essay are: ‘what are the aesthetic underpinnings for an autonomous art photography after it has been accepted and incorporated into the art institution? Secondly, if art is a form of rationality as is assumed, then how does art’s rationality differ from the rationality of the natural sciences and economic rationality?
As well as the aesthetics essay there will be an art historical essay about the photography of this period. The centre of the book is the portfolios of (approximately) 12 photographers which each photographer has about 4-6 pages for their pictures including an artist statement about their work.
Robert McFarlane has agreed to contribute to the book, and his work makes an ideal start to the book’s portfolio section. In an essay written for Robert McFarlane’s Received Moments: Photography 1961-2009 (circa 2009) travelling exhibition Gael Newton addressed one of the many gaps in her influential historical survey, Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988, which was published in 1988. She says that McFarlane was:
a significant member of the somewhat neglected generation of Australian photographers whose careers began in the late fifties and early sixties. They slip between pre-war modernists and pioneer photojournalists like David Moore, and the ‘baby boomer’ personal documentary photographers of the 1970s who claimed photography as their medium and dismissed photographers of the recent past. The young photographers of the seventies – mostly using modern 35mm reflex cameras – redefined documentary photography as a subjective form of witness. Their preference was to show their work in books and art exhibitions rather than in mass market picture magazines.
In a footnote Newton mentioned that this “neglected group includes classic landscape photographers: John Cato (Melbourne), Richard Woldendorp (Perth), Wesley Stacey (all over Australia) and architecture and topographical artists John Gollings (Melbourne and Asia), and Richard Stringer (Queensland). The group includes documentary photographers Jeff Carter (South Coast, New South Wales) and John Williams (Tasmania). ”
It is good to see the acknowledgment of topographical photography. It’s recognition in the Australian art institution is long overdue. Continue reading
suburbia, northern Adelaide
In the previous post I mentioned that I would now concentrate on other images from the archives now that The Bowden Archives has all the images it needs. I have recently been mulling over what to do with these non-Bowden images, and I have decided that some will go into the Adelaide book whilst the others will go towards a new book project with Moon Arrow Press.
This is the independent press run by Adam Jan Dutkiewicz and which published my Abstract Photography book in 2016. Adam and I had a chat about this Adelaide photography book recently, and we tentatively agreed to start working on it next year, after he finishes Volume 2 of the Visual History of the Royal South Australia Society of Arts book. Continue reading
The Adelaide hills
Once I’d purchased a VW Kombi I was able to make little road trips outside of the city, I started exploring around the Adelaide Hills and the Mt Lofty Ranges. I was stunned to see how small the city of Adelaide actually was sitting on the Adelaide plains. It really was an isolated, provincial city when compared to Melbourne and Sydney. It was easy to see how it was becoming marginalised.
I was shocked by how barren or stripped the landscape was. The colonial settler society’s ethos of men’s mastery of nature resulted the trees being few and far between in many places. It was a reminder of the significance of agriculture prior to the emergence of manufacturing after 1945. Most land clearing occurred from the turn of the 19th century to the mid-20th century. The post World War 2 land development boom has seen the clearance of hundreds of thousands of hectares of native vegetation in the agricultural regions of the State. By the 1980s over 70 per cent of the land had been cleared. The land tax favoured the clearing of native vegetation not its conservation. Continue reading
sand dunes
The beach is more than a space for people to walk, sunbath and swim. It has a past and a future and this indicates that the sand dunes and the fragile dune vegetation are in need different forms of coastal protection and management. Hence the use of both sand-drift fencing to help restore and protect dune systems from erosion, by trapping wind-blown sand in the vicinity of the fence where natural vegetation is not sufficient to do so effectively, and various revegetation and restoration projects.
Beaches have a history and for Adelaide’s coastal beaches this history is one of coastal degradation.
Prior to European settlement, the beaches were naturally replenished from the dunes and the southern beaches, and therefore sand movement could continue almost indefinitely. Predominant wave energy hitting beaches from the southwest naturally shifted sand in a northerly direction along the coastline with most of the sand accumulating at Semaphore and North Haven. Development along our coast however, has resulted in large quantities of the sand supply either being ‘locked up’ (eg., ate the harbours at Glenelg and West Beach) or removed from the beach system, preventing natural replenishment. As a result, natural processes and coastal storms have continually eroded beach width, and without artificial replenishment, the sand will continue to erode away, exposing the underlying hard rocks and clays. Continue reading
edgeland
Another archival image from the incompleted Port Adelaide project.
The image of an edgeland is looking across an urbanscape that was routinely dismissed as swampland to the Adelaide hills from the Grand Trunkway. This runs to Garden Island and the Torrens Power Station. This edgeland at Gillman was earmarked for a high tech industrial expansion around Port Adelaide that never really happened.
The degraded urban environment at Gilman was the chosen site for the proposed Multi Function Polis (MFP)—a Japanese proposal for a futuristic high tech city—in the 1980s. Australia at the time had an inward looking and inefficient manufacturing sector, an over reliance on an uncertain commodity market and was seeking international investment to help modernise its economy.
Port River estuary
This photo is from the incompleted Port Adelaide project. The photo is of the Port River estuary looking across to Penrice Soda Products’ soda ash production facility at Osborne, Adelaide. It is is a film based photo made with a view camera. Sadly, my attempt in the 1980s to photograph Port Adelaide as a project didn’t get very far .
Looking back from the present I can see that, with the emergence of postmodernism and then digital technologies, this kind of topographical photography was about to disappear from view: a topographical photography has been transformed into a mere ghost of its former self.
The economic background is that Penrice Soda Holding Ltd went into liquidation on July 31st 2014, having collapsed in April 2014, leaving people without employment, and funds not available for their entitlements, and debts of more than $150 million. Penrice had use of hectares of Renewal SA land for storing their waste material.
Some of that waste material lies south of Penrice’s plant, on the west side of the Port River (between the rail freight line and the Port River) and some in piles on the east side of the River. The prime responsibility for the cleanup is with the company, but it is in receivership and unlikely to be able to meet the bill. The contaminated Osborne site becomes the responsibility of the state government (ie., Renewal SA.), since as no-one is likely to buy a contaminated site that has no use. Continue reading
The Bowden Archive and Other Marginalia 