I'm in the Queenstown library searching online for photos by JW Beattie of the Queenstown Mt Lyell mine for their rephotography project.

Beattie had been employed by the North Mount Lyell Company to photograph between Gormanston, Tasmania and Kelly Basin in the 1890s. I understand that he produced a substantial body of work.

The latest issue of Surrealism and the Americas is a special issue on Women in the Surrealist Conversation. Katherine Conley, the editor, says that the proliferation of academic research means that it is not possible for critics to claim that women did not play a significant role in the surrealist conversation.

By the latter Conley means:

the launch, exchange and constant adjustment and reformulation of circulating ideas , images, metaphors, and jokes typical of a group conversation conducted in a cafe or over a dinner table or a banquet ... Women had a place at the table and their work in art and writing reflects their visible presence in the intellectual economy of Surrealism .... The voices, paintings drawings, poems, writings, sculptures, photographs, essays, dances and films by women only consolidated what had always been a movement rooted in intimacy, of the self with the self as well as with others.

Now that Suzanne has arrived back from her trip to Europe I've made arrangements to return to Queenstown, Tasmania to rephotograph the Mt Lyell Open Cut mine with my 5x4 Linhof. I wasn't able to do that on the March trip because of lack of access to the mine. I only had time for a quick look using a digital camera.

The classic work in this kind of industrial landscapes is that Edward Burtynsky's Australian Minescapes; a series structured around the aesthetics of the industrial sublime.

Australian Minescapes, was commissioned by FotoFreo, with the support of BHP Billiton Iron Ore and the FotoFreo Angels. It was done in 2007 and exhibited at the Western Australian Museum - Maritime for FotoFreo in 2008. The series includes 27 large scale framed chromogenic photographs and 1 triptych taken at various minesite locations in Kalgoorlie, Dampier and Lake Lefroy in Western Australia. This collection were subsequently gifted to the Western Australian Museum by Edward Burtynsky.

An image by Martin Schoeller on the front cover of the recent issue of Time magazine features Jamie Lynne Grumet, a slim, blond 26-year-old Los Angeles mother of two, breastfeeding her younger son Aram, who turns four next month. Aram stands on a chair to reach his mother’s chest and casts a sidelong glance at the camera as he feeds. He is at an age most kids have been weaned by. As part of that shoot, Schoeller also photographed members of three other families from across the country

It is attention grabbing--look at me. Is it what Americans call link-bait, given the huge drops in circulation experienced by Time? "The words "are you mom enough" suggests this, given that the cover refers to the magazine’s feature story on “attachment parenting”.

"Attachment parenting” is designed to foster a secure bond to the child. It promotes practices such as baby wearing (carrying a baby close in a slinglike cloth carrier), co-sleeping, or the “family bed,” and and extended breast-feeding ie., well past babyhood are sometimes the hallmarks of attachment parenting.

Out of Focus: Photography is the Saatchi Gallery's big contemporary photography show in London. It is Saatchi’s first major photography exhibition in a decade, and a self-styled cross-section of the world of photography now. The show has been interpreted as a mirror of the fractured world of contemporary practice.

The exhibition does not pretend to be a survey, or overview of contemporary photography. Rather, it demonstrates both Saatchi’s eclectic taste and the huge variety of uses to which the medium is being put now the rulebook has been thrown out and anything goes.

One body of work that does stand are the collages of John Stezaker who splices together the publicity shots that film stars once sent to adoring fans; two faces unite to form a monstrous hybrid whose Jekyll and Hyde plausibility is extremely beguiling even when different genders are involved.

I've just come across the Fascinating Photography e-letter. From what I can gather it used to be a new bi-monthly PDF fine art photography e-magazine. I'm not sure what has happened to it.

There is an e-book, which is a compilation of interviews that were originally published in the first three issues of Fascinating Photography e-magazine (from August 2011 to January 2012). The PDF e-magazines are no longer available.

There are interesting links eg., to Burn magazine; to Camera Obscura--a literary and photography magazine; and to Lenscratch, a blogzine that explores contemporary photography.

This portrait of an aboriginal man is in marked contrast to Paul Foelsche's photographic portraits of aboriginal people in colonial Australia.

Gordon Bennett's image recognizes that Mabo himself is only knowable to most of us through the images and discourses that make him present in the public domain.

The partial words that frame Mabo's head are taken from newspaper headlines, a multi-layered jumble referring to the toxic environment of race relations and the complex discursive field of conflict that erupted as Mabo's claim to ownership of his customary lands in the Torres Strait was interpreted in law and subsequently legislatively enshrined in the Native Title Act.

As noted in an earlier post Paul Foelsche joined the South Australian Police Force in 1856; in December 1869 he was officer-in-charge of the first police detachment posted to the Northern Territory. He was promoted to inspector in 1873. He succeeded Captain Samuel Sweet as leading photographer of the Northern Territory where his work became the main pictorial record of Aborigines (the Larrakia people).

In the late 19th and early 20th century photographs of Australian Aborigines came to be of great interest to European scholars. Aborigines formed the outstanding example of so-called 'primitive society'. The idea of a people still living in the Stone Age (in popular parlance) made information about these 'contemporary ancestors' of utmost importance to the scientific community. Museums played a major role in the dissemination of the evolutionary hypotheses to the general public. To illustrate the earliest stages of human life and culture, the 'primitive' artefacts, skulls and photographs of Aborigines were in demand.

The precious Kodak moments and memories of yesteryear are now being captured with an iPhone or an Android phone, then uploaded to the computer or to Instagram. At the heart of Kodak’s tragic demise is the digital camera, a technology invented by Kodak in the 1970s, only to be ignored by its creators and championed by its rivals.

The smart phone is rapidly replacing the small point and shoot digital cameras. Sales of the point and shoot camera are in decline, not because people are taking less photographs, but because of the rapidly improving cameras in the smart phones. Image capturing quality is now a key consideration in the engineering process of new smartphones as is their integration into network technology.

Head On is the largest photo festival in Australia with 200 photographic events---exhibitions, events and seminars--- staged in Sydney between 4 May and 3 June 2012.

One exhibition that aroused my curiousity was the work done by Peter Elfes, who has over the past four years, photographed Lake Eyre and the Central and Eastern desert regions of Australia. The Green Desert exhibition features low level aerial image of this landscape.

The Barrier Range, is about 50km north of Broken Hill in eastern NSW and it is part of the Broken HiIl Bioregion. I must have gone quite close to the Barrier Range, when I visited Silverton a couple of years ago.

Beat Streuli shoots images for his large-scale photographs, videos and photographic installations in dense urban spaces. Often focusing on single people in amidst the constant flow of the street, his works captures both the daily drama of individuals and the rhythm of the multitude.

He is included in this I Spy: Photography 1938-201 and the Theatre of the Street, 1938-2010 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington --along with Walker Evans, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, Bruce Davidson and Philip-Lorca diCorcia. The text by Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head, department of photographs, says:

All these photographs and videos court happenstance, and all these artists view the city as an endless spectacle. In this age of cell phone and security cameras, YouTube and Google Earth, the photographs also make us aware of our uneasy relationship to the camera, suggesting both our fascination and discomfort with its intrusion into our daily lives.

I've been working on my photobooks whilst Suzanne is in Europe to walk part of the Santiago de Compostela pilgrim trail. There's been lots of rain in southern France in the early spring and the mud is everywhere.

Whilst working on the photobooks I have found that the Posterous micro publishing software allows me to go back to an old post and add large photos to it. In contrast, though Tumblr allows me to edit the text and swap a large photo in an old post, it does not allow me to add additional large pictures. So I cannot build upon the initial sketch in an old post.

I didn't really know much about either publishing platform when I started the photobooks so I decided to experiment with them. I started a different book on each one to see how things turned out. It then took me a while to get used to the software.

Unfortunately, the Adelaide book was started on the Tumblr publishing platform, and its that book that I want to add photos to. So I've started the process of moving the old material of the Adelaide book from the Tumblr platform to the Posterous one.

Paul Foelsche's photography might have remained a hobby if it wasn't for the International Exhibitions of the 1870s. The South Australian Government was keen to promote its 'northern territory' to international investors, and Foelsche was asked to contribute photographs of Darwin and of the townships, mines, and country to the south.

This is frontier photography made by an police Inspector who commanded the Northern Territory police force for 34 years from 1870 to 1904 and who explored the landscape around Darwin. He appears to have built on the work done by Captain Sweet in the Northern Territory.

I'm at a bit of a loss to know how to continue with my Rethinking documentary photography after returning from Tasmania. So I thought that I'd do a bit of re-reading of some old texts on documentary photography that I'd read some time ago. Richard Bolton, ed., The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990) was one such text.

I came across an old essay by Martha Rosler, and in digging around on the internet I came across her 1990s essay 'Post Documentary, Post Photography' in Decoys, Disruptions: Selected Writings 1974-2001. She refers to the various challenges that radically undermine photography's fundamental claim to a unique capacity to offer a direct insight into the real. Or to put it another way the Enlightenment ideal that drove the invention of photographic technology in the first place—a form of representation that promised unmediated knowledge of the material world.

The challenges to this ideal of photography as a window on the world,t have, in turn, produced, something of a crisis among artists and intellectuals, and troubled some in journalism and the legal profession. This 'crisis of the real' is understood in terms of reality being sold out in favour of manipulation and artful practiced, as for example computer programs that easily manipulate and alter the image. This leads to a turning away from an interest in indexicality, the privileged viewpoint of witness, and embeddness in a particular moment in space and time.

Since the weather was no good for photography at Victor Harbor I've spent the afternoon working on a section of my Victor Harbor book in which reference is made to the photographs of Ed Ruscha

This particular text was important in art history terms---in the context of American-style formalism, Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field painting--as Ruscha started from architecture as referent, deployed photography systematically as the representational medium, and developed a new form of distribution, ie., the commercially produced book as opposed to the white cube art galley.

The mode of photography chosen was explicitly situated as much outside of all conventions of art photog- raphy as outside of those of the venerable tradition of documentary photogra- phy, least of all that of "concerned" photography. This was a deadpan, anonymous, amateurish approach to photographic form that was referenced by the New Topographics movement in the US in the 1970s.

Captain Sweet arrived in Adelaide to set up his photographic practice in 1866 and he spent the next twenty years photographing the most important period of South Australia’s development. He photographed the growth of the city from its infancy to economic, cultural and industrial maturity; witnessing the construction of some of Adelaide’s most important buildings and the establishment of its first major transport and communication systems. He remained the foremost landscape photographer in South Australia until his death in 1886.

Captain Sweet worked with wet plate negatives and albumen silver paper for most of his career. In 1880 he introduced dry plate negatives to South Australia. Dry plates were glass plates coated with a gelatin emulsion of silver salts. They did away with all the messy chemicals of wet plate negatives, were far easier to use and much more sensitive, requiring shorter exposure times. Glass plates continued to be used into the early twentieth century, when nitrocellulose roll film became generally available.

I've been searching for pictures of Frank Hurley in Adelaide, given my work on my book on Adelaide. Most of Hurley's Adelaide work--a city portrait-- is pretty pedestrian--a celebration of modernization (Adelaide University) and a representation of the statutes of imperial wars. This is one of the more interesting pictures:

Hurley represented Australia as a privileged place, open, spacious, rich in resources and with a manifest destiny to achieve greatness—'the most valuable acquisition Great Britain ever made'. In this last phase of his life --the 1950s he created a large body of work which reflected his own obsessive celebration of the land, the people and the abundant opportunity of Australia.

This is a short film inspired by and featuring music from Levon Helm's album Dirt Farmer.

The album is an absorbing look back at his roots as the son of a farm family in the rural South. It is a compassionate and full-hearted set of roots music from a master of the form.