Grassy landscapes and the Australian representational imaginary: the ongoing tale of South Australia's 'Diesel and Dust' house (original) (raw)
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Land Dialogues: Contemporary Australian Photography (in Dialogue with Land)
2016
The work presented in the 2016 exhibition Land Dialogues-Contemporary Australian Photography (in Dialogue with Land), can be read as a contemporary post-photographic project seeking to challenge the enduring traditions of landscape photography. In a wider context, Land Dialogues seeks to challenge the established values associated with our culture of consumption and anxiety, particularly the culturally constructed (and supported) separation between human beings, nonhuman beings and the earth systems in which we all live. Artists represented in Land Dialogues employ a variety of photographic methods to address themes including global warming, ecological estrangement, the perception of nature, biodiversity loss, alternative histories and the relationships between human and non-human beings. The new and varied approaches for communicating these themes are symbolic of a wider cultural shift that is taking place as the realities of global warming sink in. It is becoming clear that some fundamental assumptions about the relationship between modern capitalist societies and the Earth's life systems are flawed. There is a growing cultural movement seeking to question the traditions and values of consumption and excess associated with a capitalist consumer society, in a bid to move towards a culture of ecological awareness and respectful earthly stewardship.
Pulletop and Thornthwaite: photographs of pastoral properties in nineteenth-century New South Wales
Journal of Australian Studies, 2012
This article compares two different photographic accounts of working pastoral landscapes in nineteenth-century New South Wales between 1860 and the mid 1890s. Joseph and Ernest Docker's photographs of their property (c. 1860–1869) disavow details of labour and land productivity in favour of producing picturesque landscape photographs. Both Dockers were educated amateurs, producing delicate, hand-made photographs demonstrating their cultural sophistication. The photographs of Pulletop Station (c. 1886–1891), in contrast, celebrate conspicuous leisure and show class relations. The owners, Edmund and Ashley Westby, commissioned the photographs to celebrate the productivity and cultural refinements of the property. The photographer, Charles Bayliss, was a commercial landscape photographer based in Sydney. The Westbys’ interest in a photographic celebration of the landscape suggests that they were concerned with new representational forms, creating a link between the acquisition of ...
Revue LISA / LISA e-journal, vol. XVII-n°1 , 2019
The article concentrates on contemporary British artistic photography and on how it represented industrial and post-industrial sites in the period of de-industrialisation. It starts with the examination of how British photography perpetuated an idealised image of the rural landscape as a locus of national identity. Industry and industrial architecture were excluded from this vision. By the end of the 20th century, de- industrialisation meant that many former industrial sites were demolished or redeveloped. At the same time, a growing appreciation of industrial heritage translated into an increased interest in post-industrial sites, also on the part of photographers. This paper investigates how contemporary landscape photography has sought to introduce the image of industrial ruins into the realm of collective visual imagination by drawing on aesthetic conventions of the Picturesque and the Pictorial, on the one hand, and on the conventions characteristic for developments in contemporary photography (from documentary aesthetics in the work of John Davies, through the “abject” in the work of Richard Billingham and Tom Hunter, to the post-pastoral landscape photography by John Kippin). Contemporary landscape photography attempts to reinstate the image of Britain’s industrial past into commonly shared imagination, where the conflicted nature of the country’s cultural identity – the clash between the “Northern” and “Southern” metaphors – reveals itself with particular force.