From the archives.
This abstraction of a rock face was made in 2010 in Queenstown, Tasmania.
I'm currently going through my film archives.
I continue to plug away on the coastal abstractions whilst I am on my morning and evening poodle walks.
Plug away because I am not sure what I am going to do with this body of work.
A quartz abstraction made whilst on a poodlewalk along the coastal rocks west of Rosetta Head:
The location is a set of on the western edge of Dep's Beach.
From the archives: an abstract that would have been made around 2001-2, before there was the ocean of digital images in social media where people consume and discard images so rapidly. Before the emergence of our image-heavy world, where it is no longer enough to simply ‘make a photograph'. Photography now needs some concepts or ideas.
This looks back to that time, when as argued by photo historians such as Lyle Rexer and Carol Squires something happened to photography in the 1960s/1970s that made it impossible to look at art photographs in the traditional way. What shifted with this event, it is argued, was the emergence of an assumption that photography never did simply open a window on the world. Photography as a window on the world was the traditional view of photography, but there had also been artists who had been experimenting with and redrawing the boundaries of traditional photography for decades.
That event was conceptual art, the movement that saw a gravitation toward language-based art, a lo-fi aesthetic and an understanding of art as primarily a way of exploring ideas--then anti-commodification, social and/or political critique, and ideas/information as medium Although it often yielded nothing more than ephemeral events or experiments, its impact is all over the art world. Conceptual art introduced to the art world various types of photography that had been excluded or ignored, while calling attention to the fact that even photographs that seemed straightforward often demanded a second look.
This was made whilst on a poodle walk at the Coorong in South Australia
I was there scoping for a photoshoot.
a collection of bark in the reserve across the road from Encounter Studio
This was the start of a number of studies that lead to an exhibition of abstractions at the Light Gallery in Adelaide during the 2015 SALA Festival
Another sea abstract from the time we stayed at American River on Kangaroo Island.
I spent the last morning on the local jetty making a number of abstracts using both digital and film cameras.
I made some sea abstracts at the jetty at American River this morning.
As a concept, abstract photography is often seen as a contradiction in terms. Photographs, after all, always represent some trace of physical reality, even if it is not immediately recognizable. The medium's inherent knack for representation paradoxically makes it an ideal instrument for probing and challenging the language of abstraction.
Consequently, abstraction has never been anything like orthodoxy in photography. It’s always been peripheral to the medium and dropped in and out of vogue and critical prominence.
Is there a movement of contemporary abstraction in todays art photography? Art photography has been dominated by a factual, relatively unemotional work: water towers, suburban developments, and austere portraits ruled within the prevalent movements of New Topographics and the Dusseldorf School of photography.
Is there a movement of non representational photography that makes make visible the tension between abstraction and camera representation, and which has it roots in post-modernism? What is over, after postmodernism, is the narrow view of photography — the idea that the camera is a recording device, not a creative tool, and that its product is strictly representational — not manipulated, not fabricated, not abstract.
I'm finding this project hard. It's not coming off very well. Things are not coming together. Whatever I try doesn't really work or fall into place. The improvisation on a theme is off key. I'm just going to have to practice more. Thank heavens for digital technology. It allows me afford to make mistakes.
Music is a good way to understand the photographic process. So we have composition, tonality improvisation, motion, rhythm, interpretation as well as light and colour.
This places an emphasis on the interpretation of a score or theme as distinct from originality, genius and masterworks of the modernist tradition that placed on photography as an artistic medium, which has specific properties and representational problematics. Once art was liberated from representation (realism) it had to justify its existence as the search for its own essence.
Formalist modernism held that each art medium must determine, through rigorous self-examination of its own operations and effects, those specific qualities unique to itself. Hence the modernist reading of an image that rejects context and meaning and places an emphasis on purity, the self-sufficiency of the photograph, and photography's inherent nature as a medium. We end up with disembodied self-closure of pure visuality.
Improvisation not coming together brings the idea of formless into play---the improvisation goes no where. It just winds down and becomes disorder.