This photo was made in the summer of 2024. The location is around the western corner of Petrel Cove on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. It was the late afternoon to avoid the bright light of the summer sun.
The dried out salt depends on high tides, no sand cover, and the summer heat to evaporate the seawater in the rock pools during the day. Outside of summer there are the various rock pools that do not evaporate.
Whilst on the early morning poodlewalk with Maya along the littoral zone of the coastal rocks on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula I started scoping for a possible 5x4 photo session. As Maya is now starting to hang around me whilist I spend time photographing I reckoned it would be possible to use a 5x4 with a dark cloth.
This is what I came up with today --- a close up, or macro view, of an isolated rock with a quartz vein:
I had photographed the rock a few days earlier from a broader perspective.
On the way back from walking for 6 days in the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges National Park we spend some time exploring Brachina Gorge in the Ikara-Flinders Ranges National Park.
This quartz abstraction was made recently on an afternoon poodlewalk with Maleko. The walk was along the coast in Waitpinga, on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula South Australia.
During early autumn it has been cloudy in the morning and , clearing around midday and sunny in the afternoon. It has been a while since we have done this pm walk as the afternoon light has been too bright around 5-6pm. I was fortunate on this occasion. There was afternoon cloud.
I was taken by the soft colours of the quartz vein amongst the coastal granite rocks in the soft afternoon light:
Wirth summer just around the corner this part of the coast is still in sunlight between 5-6pm when I am on a poodlewalk. It is only rarely that there is cloud cover at this time of the day. This was one of those occasions.
This picture is part of an ongoing series that depends on certain weather conditions along the littoral zone.
It was made on a poodlewalk during a a wild storm event. The tide was high, the wind was gusty and strong, and the waves were very high. It was quite dangerous making my way around the rocks west of Petrel Cove. We--Maleko and myself--- had to proceed with great caution.
I made a video of the surging waves using my iPhone 6 whilst on this afternoon walk. The waves swirled around my feet as I sat on a rock making the video.
From this low-fi blog in a minor photographic key a proposed online abstraction exhibition at Encounters Gallery has emerged that explores the contemporary nature of abstraction as opposed to the art historical one that sees abstraction as an modernist style of the 20th century. It is seen as outmoded--a pure” form or aesthetic form(s) that transcends historical and social influence that ran out of steam in the 1970s. Abstraction is locked into an historical dead end.
This art historical account still remains the dominant interpretation of (painterly) abstraction and so it appears to be very odd to speak of abstraction and politics, abstraction and culture, abstraction and gender or abstraction and race.
What has emerged from the blog is a proposed online abstraction exhibition at Encounters Gallery.This exhibition on abstraction photography includes some of my photos as well as possibly those of two colleagues, namely Beverley Southcott and Adam Dutkiewicz. We have exhibited together before, and Adam and I have published a book with Moon Arrow Press on abstract photography in 2016.
The background and the context of this digital abstraction can be found in this post on the Encounter Studio photo blog. The image, which is another fragment in the abstraction series, delights in colour.
A digital image poses a problem: Is the digital work its file, encoded and encrypted and clearly mathematical, or is it a fulfilled, material expression of that file? Or is it both of these? The key is the integration of photography into the network milieu with the emergence of new practices for circulating and archiving everyday images (eg., on Flickr). The makes the photograph's condition one in which the image increasingly functions as a form of data regulated by statistical/algorithmical processes.
Made whilst I was on an late afternoon poodlewalk with Maleko:
It was in mid-winter when the photo was made.
This abstraction of a granite formation was made just west of Petrel Cove when I was on a poodlewalk with Kayla in the early morning:
I was working nearby on a series of salt abstractions at the time--mid February 2019--and I saw this rock formation.