The Ipswich Art Gallery in Queensland has an upcoming exhibition entitled The Ipswich House: Heritage house portraits. The blurb states that this exhibition is a:

picturesque and illuminating foray into the history and vision of Queensland’s early domestic architecture as seen through the eyes of 13 contemporary Queensland artists, The Ipswich House examines the city’s significant architectural heritage through a selection of commissioned ‘house portraits’ across a diverse range of mediums. These house portraits are more than mere pictorial representations of the city’s heritage-listed buildings, instead offering explorations into the architectural design, construction and fabrication methods while also exposing more than a hint of the personal histories and memories of their former residents.

So we really have little idea of the content of the exhibition. Things won't change much when the exhibition is up and running since Ipswich Art Gallery has a limited online presence. So we have no idea how the various artists in the exhibition represent Queensland’s early domestic architecture, or the rationale for this exhibition.

Edward Burtynsky has taken aerial photographs of the oil spill in The Gulf Of Mexico. Burtynsky has explored the theme of oil for more than a decade, from the Alberta oil sands to Baku, Azerbaijan, one of the earliest sites of oil discovery.

This Oil Spill work can be seen as adding to his body of work entitled Edward Burtynsky: Oil that documents the effects of oil on our lives. This work is also a traveling exhibition.

Apparently, there has been a turn back to large format photography, including 8x10. This is in spite of he besieged mentality has settled over anyone who still shoots film, the slow death of 8x10 monorail, the worries that the classical manufactures not turn out new product, and the fears about commitment by film companies to continue manufacturing film. Has the market seems to have stabilized?

The professional commercial photographers and news photojournalists have shifted to, and will remain with, digital, due to client demands. The commercial world is pretty happy with their 39 megapixel digital backs. It is the serious amateurs (either either retired or have full-time jobs) and fine art photographers have shifted to large format. When going to new locations I use my digital camera as a scouting shot--or “sketch pad” of sorts --- for future 5 x 7 and 8 x10 images.

In an earlier post I mentioned the Shimmer Photographic Festival that was organized by the City Of Onkaparinga. As part of this photo biennale there was a 'Meet the photographer' session at the Arts Centre Port Noarlunga.

I had intended to go to the session but wasn't able to. So I will explore the different photographers talking at the session on junk for code over the next week or so. One of those speaking was Ronda Wallis, a South Australian photographer whose work I did not know, and whose roots are in the low tech or toy camera end of photography.

Wallis' images from her Beckon a Deep Ocean are concerned with the coastal environment, are characterised by a low angle of view and a measure of distortion, and are taken using pinhole cameras the work shifts the viewer’s usual perspective.

I just stumbled across this song cycle from Holland--its a salute to their native state of California.

Holland followed Sunflower and Surf’s Up, which were technically complex and musically superior releases "Sail On Sailor" and “Trader” were the other two stand out tracks on Holland

The city is primarily a space for commerce. A space where buying and selling is the order of the day, and indeed night. The retail section presents as a juxtaposed collection of disparate window displays, all vying for the unreasonable and excessive attention of the passing public, trying to seduce them into the game of consumer fetishism that embodies the vision of freedom through lifestyle consumption in a neoliberal world.

Today we see people; especially the middle classes, increasingly retreat into suburban havens that include shopping malls. They no longer partake in the culture of street life but rather disengage it, both geographically and politically. When they walk the city streets it is for work or shopping. They walk past the cultural detritus of the present and the past, avoiding the unclean consumer waste on the street or in the parklands, muttering that there is a need to ‘clean up’ the debris.

Of course, there are other forms of waste in the city--the idle of bodies of the homeless, mentally ill, aborigines, unruly public drinkers, drug users. The attitude is that there is a need to remove the waste, to ‘clean up’ the streets.

The Tate Modern has an exhibition entitled Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. It refers to the different ways that the camera has been used to make images surreptitiously and satisfy the desire to see what is hidden.

If the unwieldy nature of early photographic equipment made it very difficult to capture people unawares, then the classic Leica (film camera) made it easy:

The Callahan image is in the first section of the exhibition, which considers ways in which photography can reveal the world unawares and show people caught with their guard down.

Space and place are complex.Though different concepts, they merge into one another. Nonhuman animals also have a sense of territory and of place. Spaces are marked off and defended against intruders. Places are centers of felt value where biological needs, such as those for food, water, rest, and procreation, are satisfied.

Yi-Fu Tuan in his Space and Place: the perspective of experience says:

"Space"and "place" are familiar words denoting common "experiences. We live in space. There is no space for a another building on the lot. The Great Plains look spacious. Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other. There is no place like home. What is home? It is the old homestead, the old neighborhood, home- town, or motherland. Geographers study places. Planners would like to evoke "a sense of place." These are unexceptional ways of speaking. Space and place are basic components of the lived world; we take them for granted. When we think about them, however, they may assume unexpected meanings and raise questions we have not thought to ask.

Carolyn Drake has chronicled areas threatened by Turkey’s Southeast Anatolia Project. Among them is the town of Hasankeyf which is situated along the Tigris River in Turkey sixty-five kilometres upstream from the Syria and Iraq borders. The town, along with more than fifty villages scattered along the banks of the Tigris, will eventually submerge under the floodwaters of the Ilisu Dam, when it is completed in 2013.

The Ilisu Dam, will displace thousands of people and cover most of the archaeology that’s built into the landscape. The twenty-two dams that constitute the project will help modernize Turkey’s poorest region.

I could barely do my online work whilst I was down at Victor Harbor this week. Although this coastal town is on the urban rim of Adelaide, we are only able to access ADSL because of Telstra. The backhaul transmission link is owned by Telstra and it is the only link. Telstra is a monopolist and it has not time for the regions, other than to prevent a competitive market emerging.

After the recent storms the internet was clogged up or blocked. I could barely post. It would take ages to download and I could barely upload material to my weblogs. It had been like that on the weekend and it continued all week. It was hopeless to work with.

Was it the backhaul transmission link to Adelaide that was causing the bottleneck problem? Or the "last mile" Telstra line to the exchange? I had no idea, as the connection was so slow I couldn't get out to the Internode website to see what was happening. The telecommunications problems faced by regional consumers are particularly stubborn, and they have been used as a ransom note in conflicts between Telstra and Government for a decade or more.

Telstra management say that they are simply determined to try to maximize profits once they'd been privatised, and that the regions didn’t fit in that picture.They would rather not have to invest in these low-margin, high cost customers, even though it has banked banks billions in profits a year. As an effective monopolist Telstra saw the consumer pressure for better services in regions as leverage for either more money in subsidies, greater regulatory advantage, or both.

I've returned to Victor Harbor via the Shimmer Photographic Festival organized by the City Of Onkaparinga. I wanted to have a look at the interesting 'Now and Then' exhibition by Tony Kearney and Sandra Elms at the Wirra Wirra Winery in McLaren Vale. McLaren Vale is one of the key wine regions of South Australia

I'm just playing around with computer software---Silver Efex Pro---in order to get my eye back into black and white when I start sbooting with my old 8 x 10.

in the opening pages of his Camera Lucida Roland Barthes writes that he wished to identify photography‟s “essential features” through a phenomenology, and that “[he] wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was "in itself‟”. However, Camera Lucida has little to say about photography at all, as it is more a meditation on representation and mourning.

I am not really convinced that we should be talking about what what Photography is "in itself‟ meaning that it has universal, necessary or essential characteristics. I've tended to see it as a form of print making, but this is no longer possible given the digital turn in photography and our habits of looking at photographs as digital images on the web (eg., Flickr, or on photographer's websites).

The project Suburbia Mexicana explores the major transformation in the landscape was taking place in Mexico city. Both private and public sectors are enforcing it and thousands of serial houses are being built. Cartagena says:

The economic strategies, implemented with a new publicly financed plan, had deliberately excluded urban growth from the metropolitan planning regulation. This allowed developers to design urbanization for profit rather than for the community’s well-being. Due to this plan the construction of roadways, parks and proper public transportation systems were far from becoming a reality for the future inhabitants.

The series was shot over period of three years in his hometown of Monterrey, Mexico, and focuses on disruption to the landscape, both physical and social, that has occurred as a result of overbuilding. The landscape has been urbanized before plans for efficient roadways, recreational parks and public transportation can be realized.

One way to envisage the difference between “art” and “documentary” in photography turns on this relation to language and narrative. In the main, documentary is a closed form, designed to produce preferred interpretations. As such, images are usually combined with some form of anchoring text that steers the viewer/ reader in a particular direction. Photographic art, in contrast, typically abjures words, or employs elliptical text, in order to leave the image open to associations and interpretations. For art, vagueness or ambiguity is often the preferred mode.

In the 1980s, photo exhibitions were text-intensive as a reaction against the formalist aesthetics of the previous era where any contextualization or captioning was excoriated. But the pendulum swung again, and today text is usually shunned in the gallery space and banished to the artist’s statement available at the gallery desk or as a handout for visitors. Photographers can be creative at supplementing their images by using sound, narrative forms, or producing their own gallery guide, or brochure. But it’s not seen as acceptable at the present time to “force” visitors to read texts if they do not wish to.

Victor Harbor was cold in the week that I was down there setting up the network and backing up the photos. That backup took 5 days with the old Windows based PC running nonstop. Thankfully the PC lasted and the photos were backed up.

It was a time of cold southerly winds, rain, overcast skies and chilly evenings. I had the flu which made me much more sensitive to the cold. It was only towards the end of the stay that the weather warmed up and I was in a state where I was able to play around taking some photos of rocks and moss.

That moment in the late afternoon was pleasant. The wind had dropped and there was sun. it was memorable because the seals were hunting close to the shore, schools of dolphins cruised by whilst the southern right whales frolicked offshore. Magic moments.

The election campaign that is currently taking place in Australia is widely regarded as boring, dull and uninteresting. It's all spin, personality and talking points with the politics being treated as entertainment by the media.

You can forget about policy issues: the politicians are in flight, the media caught up in election frenzy, has no interest in policy whilst the conservative (anti-Labor) media just bash the Greens as hard left (green on the outside and red on the inside).

This cartoon by Bill Leak in The Australian is one of the better visual comments on the emotions of the participants in the campaign; better because it goes behind the bland, glossy, showbiz appearances of politicians kissing babies, doing shopping mall walks and staged media interviews to state the talking point of the day in a measured tone.

In his 'Art, Common Sense and Photography' essay Victor Burgin says that because we have separate words for 'form' and 'content' we are mislead into believing that they stand for totally distinct areas of experience. He adds that there is no content without form and no form without content.

This argued against those modernist photographers who claimed that they could present a totally content-free world of pure forms and those left activists (social documentary photographers) who claim that the autonomous power of the truth can be stated regardless of formal considerations.

1 Day Only, originally uploaded by poodly.

To ease his way out of this either or that framed our understanding of photography in the 1970s, Burgin turns to semiotics or semiology and argues that the photograph is a complex of signs used to communicate a message.

Labor is the only political party committed to delivering a mandatory internet filter in Australia. Both the Liberals and The Greens oppose the mandatory aspect of the clean feed filter; a form of censorship defended by the Christian Right in its various forms.

Kate Ellis: delivering what for Adelaide?, originally uploaded by poodly.

Labor's political argument, as articulated by Senator Conroy, is that it is designed to prevent child pornography to protect kids. All those who are critical of the mandatory aspect are deemed to be defending the freedom of individuals to indulge in child pornography and supporting the abuse of children; even though the overwhelming preponderance of content which it is illegal to possess is still not published on the open web but rather inside of secret networks.

The computer network for the small office at Encounter Studio in Victor Harbor is now up and running thanks to the help from the locally based tech support. The backups of the music files and photos from the old Windows-based PC to the network are now chugging along--- they will be continue to do so over the next few days given the slowness of the backup.

Hopefully the PC, which is on its last legs, will last long enough to complete the backups to the two Lacie external hard drives that form the storage part of the network. Finally, I have the professional, reliable, central storage for instantly storing, sharing, and backing up from any PC or Mac on my network.

clay pan , originally uploaded by poodly.

The post-production photographic software has been loaded, and I've begun to experiment with it: reworking a digital colour photography into a black and white one using Silver Efex Pro. So my transition to the world of digital photography is complete. Goodbye to the dirty old world of smelly chemicals and darkrooms.

Though I found Victor Burgin's 1980s text, Thinking Photography, a hard text to understand, the core argument about the process of signification, namely, that meaning is never simply 'there', but is always produced, was very influential for me. As Burgin puts it in this interview at Eurozone this text was a questioning of the:

unexamined assumptions that then dominated writing and talking about photography. The notion of the "purely visual" was prominent amongst these, as was the naïve realist idea that photography is a transparent "window on the world". The former belief dominated "fine art" photography at that time, while the latter provided the ideological underpinning of "social documentary".

Burgin adds that since the 1970s and 1980s there has since been a massive return of "previous" frames of assumptions that had never in fact gone away. This return happens at a time when the art world and the art departments have provided media-ready art much as supermarkets provide oven-ready chickens.