Thoughtfactory: abstractions

developing the tradition of photographic abstraction

Posts for Tag: Kings Head

granite abstraction #18

At Kings Head, Waitpinga, southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia.  The background context is this online exhibition at Encounters Gallery. 

Suzanne is away in Brisbane and I am minding the 2 standards poodles. So the poodlewalks are within contained areas. Hence the walk along the Heysen Trail to Kings Beach and Kings Head. 

granite abstraction #11

This abstraction was made at  the bottom of the western edge of Kings Head, Waitpinga. It is almost to the point.   It was made whilst I was on an afternoon  poodlewalk in January, 2018:

At the time I  was struck by the light across  the face of the granite as well as the complexity of the shape of the granite formation.   The picture  was made with a digital camera,  and it was  a study for a  possible large format b+w photo. I've  never been  back  to do the b+w photo session as the Sinar f1 camera wasn't ready.  

quartz + granite

Made on a recent poodle walk near  Kings Head, Waitpinga, on the Fleurieu Peninsula.

The problem with this is  that I cannot recall where this quartz is exactly. So I cannot re-photograph it with a film camera.  

rock abstract --archives

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.