"You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved" Ansel Adams
23 July 2014
Most of Todd Hido's photographs of suburban landscapes are taken during solitary, long drives. The main subject of his work is the quality of natural and artificial light in the American landscape, as in reflected sun rays or the illumination of a television pouring from an anonymous window. Hido tkaes his pictures in a "fairly undirected way", he says, but edits his negatives together and manipulates thm until he produces an image that represents his encounter with a place. In describing his process, Hido said, "I shoot sort of like a documentarian, but I print like a painter."
30 May 2014
As a gardener with an interest in native plants and a lover of the Australian bush and landscape I have long been an admirer of the work of Fred Williams. His mark making captures the essence of the Australian terrain and the dominant flora, much like the simple and spontaneous brush strokes of Japanese and Chinese calligraphy. It eliminates the details of the super reality of what we actually see and finds the bare bones underneath.
I had never really appreciated Sydney Nolan's work until I chanced upon his retrospective exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales some years ago when I was passing through. Although iconic, his Ned Kelly figures were a bit of a cliche......then I saw the paint on the surface and the landscapes and his work took my breath away. It gave me goose bumps and still does just thinking about it today. Very little art has ever done that to me. It was consummate calligraphic mark making, abstract in the detail. I admire his work 'Snake' at MONA when I have been there and it has been available to see. It is mind boggling trying to understand the immensity of conceiving and executing the project.
Sydney Nolan's rendition of landscape with broad squeegee, palette knife and brush drawn marks also draws out the essence of the Australian landscape with his spontaneous large vertical and horizontal marks.
Whenever I look at the Australian landscape passing me by these two artists are always at the back of my mind.
Cy Twombly uses marks and words in his drawings and paintings and are the language of his visual poetry. His expressionistic mark making is beautiful in its execution and his work too was brought back to my mind when I look at the light streaks and patterns in my speed blurred images.
Cy Twombly uses marks and words in his drawings and paintings and are the language of his visual poetry. His expressionistic mark making is beautiful in its execution and his work too was brought back to my mind when I look at the light streaks and patterns in my speed blurred images.
When I was looking at photographers earlier in the year I discovered this silver gelatin photograph Sky Submerged taken by Olive Cotton in 1937, which I think is very beautiful in its simplicity. With the distant details dissolving into the whole, Olive has captured the moody Australian landscape with a beautiful balance of tones that has a grainy abstract quality.
http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/323.1996/
Ansel Adams is widely admired for the detail and depth of field of his landscapes, captured with a large format camera and darkroom developing techniques. He was one of the first photographers that I admired, along with Edward Weston, when I discovered him many decades ago and has greatly influenced many landscape photographers since, including our best Tasmanian photographic artists. He had created a benchmark of quality that many photographers hoped to realise in their work. It was certainly those sharp lines and minute details that I wanted in the first Aperture exercise, but that an SLR doesn't quite achieve.
Shutter Speed experiments
Then the exercise on Shutter Speed called for a new approach to taking a photograph. Using a fast shutter speed to capture the sharp action in the landscape would have been the approach I would have expected myself to aim for, but it was the exact opposite that surprisingly occurred.
After some experiments taking images from a moving car, I discovered the work of Narelle Autio, a photojournalist who had worked internationally before returning to Australia in 1998. With her partner Trent Park, also a photographer, they took a trip around Australia taking in the landscape with new eyes. Some of the images she made in the outback from that trip helped me to appreciate the possibilities for the type of images I had made, and in many ways reminded me of the mark making of Fred Williams and Sydney Nolan. It was a discovery of mark making with light.
Narelle Autio took photographs out of the car window.
“I am trapped in a speeding metal box, staring out
into the red heart of this country.
Through the car window, the outback is a silent blur of amazing colour
and mystery. Inside the car, time
is at a standstill and passes unbearably slow. Outside, the speed is mesmerising and beautiful and the
passage of time becomes instantly real.
It is a strange feeling, it
is as thought life doesn’t seem to pass at all until you look closely.
Mementos from time gone, static but moving, evidence
of time travel, almost but not quite. These images haunt me now...a blur of
colours rush past me in a sentimental stream of memories made and moved on
from. Then suddenly the movement
stops and other images appear and I see versions of my life flashing in and out
of the landscapes. I am in all of
them, they are part of me and they are dragging me back in time and at the same
time pushing me closer to a final unknown destination.”
(Narelle Autio 2013)
The blurred images were taken in 2003 and are part of the story of the trip, a response to
the emotional and psychological Australian terrain as well as their physical journey. The colours are smudged horizontally like brushstrokes of abstract
expressionist paintings. The
colours dissolve details, and are not so much about the landscape, but the
emotional space of travel, gazing outward to a world speeding by.
The rapidly changing scapes giving a sense that
life is moving too fast. Together all of
the images are more than the documentation of a trip. They are stories and
private reflections on subjectivity and the revelations of our observations of
the world when we look closely enough.
Autio and Parke's published photographic story telling of the year long trip ireminded me of the expansive 40 metre work Terra Spiritus by Bea Maddock. The printed work maps the Tasmanian coastline and ends where it begins....a journey that tells a different story.
Danielle Thompson was another photographer that I discovered who was using different means to capture abstracted light with her camera.
"In my art practice I explore the photographic recording of extreme sunlight. My ongoing fascination involves the transformation of these abstract photographic techniques I have used for over ten years, such as camera movement and slow shutter speed, most recently into the medium of video. In the video Place (2005) I use montage of multiple fragments to express a coexistence of time, past and present, and to evoke a deep sense of spirituality that echoes and pulsates from within the flooded river, rocky cliffs and foliage that feature in the majestic landscape of the Cataract Gorge, nestled so closely to the town of Launceston in Northern Tasmania".
(Danielle Thompson 2006)
Daniel Crooks is
well known for his mesmerising video works that splice and rearrange familiar
environments into abstract time loops. I first came
across the work of this Melbourne artist at MONA and was instantly fascinated by the video work of Martin Plaza in Sydney.
He takes
photographs that progress through time and videos of frozen moments that
move. They challenge our
perception of space and time and graphically reveal the underlying rhythms and
patterns of the physical world and trace the rhythm of our navigation through
it.
Time captured through movement is a concept that holds
a fascination for many artists, from Edweard Muybridge in the 19th
century to Daniel Crooks in the 21st century.
3 April 2014
Head-spring, a Flying Pigeon Interfering, 1885
Although we now understand the science of movement, these first studies of capturing motion have a simple poetry to the sequences of motion that are historically important.
Edward Weston
Nude 1936
Edward Weston was a photographer that I was introduced to some decades ago when I first attended art school in my late teens. His elegantly simple images with finely seen compositions, tones and depth of field are still a joy to look at over half a century later. The book Edward Weston: 50 years, Aperture, 1973 is one I have in my library that is inspirational even today.
Sunbaker 1937
At Newport 1952
Like Edward Weston, Australian photographer Max Dupain uses angles of view, compositon, shadow, highlight and tone to compose his quintessentially Australian images. To take an image that you don't tire of looking at is the test of a good photograph and would be a satisfying artistic achievement for any photographer.
Olive Cotton
Olive Cotton started taking
photographs on a Box Brownie when she was 11. Box Brownie photographs have such a beautiful quality and there were the source of the contents of many Australian family photo albums. There have been some very fine shots taken with this basic camera, and it certainly stirs up my childhood memories just seeing the word Box Brownie. I still have the camera and it would be interesting to take a series of photographs with it now.
There is a beautiful feminine quality about Olive's images, but at the same time they are very strong and keenly perceived. Photography scholar Helen Ennis describes Olive’s concerns as the ‘potential for pattern-making’.....and 'playing with scale', two qualities that many accomplished photographers use to make successful images.
Being a gardener and landscape controller myself, I identify easily with Fiona Hall's use of floral and vegetative iconography in her work, which is often much more confronting and edgy than this work, but which nevertheless has an interesting low compositional viewpoint where outrageous floral carpet merges with an equally outrageous floral upholstery fabric. the result is a mysterious and puzzling perspective.
Leura 1974
David Stephenson
Ever since I first discovered local Hobart artist David Stephenson's domes, I have been fascinated by the pattern of the subject matter. This work is not as ornate as some of the other European subjects, but the beauty of this image with its central focal point surrounded by the patina and pattern of the ancient building was enough to make us want to own it. We are fortunate to have this image in our modest personal collection.
Pantheon 20702
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