This is how we traveled around the South Island. It was our base and a lot of my photos were taken from this van:

This part of the high country was tussock country and it was where a significant part of the "Lord of the Rings" was filmed. The caravan park in MT Somers, which is where we stayed one night, had a very colourful garden structured around English flowers and trees.

The effect of Cyclone Nargis on Burma (Myanmar) has been devastating and international relief is only trickling into the country. The military junta continues to bar access to most international disaster relief specialists and continues to block aid. So a natural disaster threatens to become a a humanitarian crisis of genuinely epic proportions.

Without proper sanitation and clean water people still scavenging in the inundated remains of their homes could fall victim to waterborne diseases-----cholera, dysentery, dengue and malaria epidemics spreading among survivors is a frightening possibility. Burma is on the brink of a “devastating public health crisis” if help is not allowed to flow across its borders immediately.

It is almost summer in Arizona and the days are inching up to 100F. Despite Phoenix being beachless, Australians would be completely comfortable with the sun-drenched culture of the desert city. Weekends are spent lazing by the pool, stretched out on sun chairs, or in outdoor activities with the shirt and off and the chest bare. The local hipster hotels throw all day pool parties with cover fees in order to cash in on this love affair with the sun and socialisation.

One thing that suprised me was the level of segregation in pool culture between the creative and service industries. I was recently surprised to see several young people lazing by the pool on a weekday while the sun was at its zenith. I wondered why they weren't at work. It was not until later it occurred to me they worked in the service industry and their nights were dominated by working timetables.

By the same token I was over-hearing a conversation today between strangers where one woman was lamenting her long work hours and how it cut into her sun time such that she could only get a few hours in on the weekend. Not unlike my own situation.

Barbara Fischer has kindly given me some links to contemporary German photographers. One of these photographers is Johannes Backes:

There is very little commentary or images on the web about Backes' work and so we we have to rely on the work on his website.This appears to be organized into projects, one of which is about the Bundesstra entitled Bundesstrasse Nr. 1.This particular image, which is towards the end of the series, is untypical of the series as the interesting photography is mostly done in a documentary style.

I used my recent holiday in the South Island of NZ to continue my exploration of taking photography of the landscape from within a car or van. After all, we spent a lot of time traveling in the Britz Van, and we mostly viewed the South Island landscape we were traveling through from the van windows:

The international tourist holiday is structured around spending a lot of time driving from one iconic site to another, with quick stops at various scenes or views on the way. Most photography is taken in and around the iconic sites, such as Milford Sound or the Franz Josef Glacier.

Another kind of photography:

The Mesas in the Nilosyrtis Mensae region of Mars appear in enhanced color in this image produced from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The image, which was taken on April 5, 2007, is part of a campaign to examine more than two dozen candidate landing sites for the NASA Mars Science Laboratory rover, which is scheduled for launch in 2009.

An example of urban nature in an empty (industrial and modernist?) city:

It's a bleak urban image. However, some of our cities are changing. As Norman Day observes in The Age about Melbourne:

The city centre has benefited from people making it their home, bringing it back to life at all hours so it is no longer just the business centre of a dormitory metropolis. There are now fewer dead parts to the city. Relaxed licensing laws have resulted in a proliferation of small bars, cafes and restaurants that keep the city active.

If the boom in German photography was in the 1990s, then the sole supremacy of the Düsseldorf Becher school with its strictly documentary perspective of the first generation of practitioners looks to be fading, if not definitely over.

An alternative photography school is at the University of Essen. An example is the work is Jitka Hanzlová, which is characterized by careful composition, a subtle sense of colour and light, and a quietly poetic painterly quality. She is known for her portrait work but there is an non-portrait strand about the village where she grew up.

Biosphere 2 was established as a private concern by a Texan billionaire which was intended to pay its own way through the development of patents. It was established sixty miles east of Tucson due to the strong sunlight and clean environment.

From a visual point of view the most interesting aspect is the structure itself with its strong white interconnected lines, pale glass windows against a strong blue Arizonan sky.

I know little about contemporary German photography apart from the work of Andreas Gursky and the landscape work of Michael Reisch. My impression is that photography in Germany is booming.

What I do know that in the 1920s and early ‘30s German photography was dominated by two distinct approaches to making images. The first is associated with the work and ideas of László Maholy-Nagy (1895-1946), championed unconventional forms and techniques, unexpected vantage points, and playful printing techniques to engender a fresh rapport with the visible world. The other, part of a movement called New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), emphasized rigorous and close observation, bringing a sharply focused, documentary quality to the photographic art. It included Albert Renger-Patzsch, August Sander, and Werner Manz.

And since then? The key figures among the later group are Bernd and Hilla Becher, who since 1959 have explored the forms of the built environment, including traditional German houses and, most famously, industrial structures, making hundreds of images of water towers, blast furnaces, and mining apparatus.

I gather that there work has been been influential and so way can talk in terms of the Düsseldorf school ie., the so-called Becher School at the Düsseldorf Art Academy.

Australia on the international fashion map. Sydney is the hub of Australia’s fashion design and manufacturing industry – and it aims to become the fashion capital of the Asia Pacific. Like the Logies the Rosemount Sydney Fashion Week is a bubble around which circulate a galaxy of media.

The media commentary is very much a celebration of what is happening inside the bubble, rather than a cultural criticism of fashion, by the fashion bloggers.

This image is from the Astronomy Picture of the Day series and is the work of an amateur astrophotographer.

Astrophotography is booming with the advent of digital cameras, since special light-pollution filters and advanced techniques of computer processing, allow photographers to capture l astrophotographs even from light-polluted, suburban skies.

Photoforum showcases New Zealand photographic work and, from all accounts, it is run on a shoestring with lots of volunteer labour, gathered around the editorship of John B Turner. It is part of the art institution and the people associated with this non-profit society have historically aimed to:

showcase local talent, critically inform, stimulate and challenge New Zealand photographers to develop their ideas into a tangible body of work, as a portfolio, essay, exhibition, or book.

What surprised me about Photoforum when I rediscovered it whilst surfing the internet when in NZ was the absence of the work of landscape photographers, such as Kate Pedley and Daniel Murray. They did not appear in PhotoForum's survey of contemporary New Zealand photography in 2000--The Active Eye.

Colin McCahon's 'Victory over Death 2' belongs to his Practical Religion series. I was never able to connect with this religious based work when I was living in NZ, even though McCahon is known for incorporating text and iconography. I much preferred the abstracted regionalist landscapes then.

Now I can appreciate the the stark black and white and tonalities of grey, the way that the text is an integral part of the work and the struggles with faith in 'Victory over Death 2'.

In 1978 the painting was given by the New Zealand government to Australia in commemoration of that country's bicentenary. The tabloid media in Australia had a ball. This iconic work is now in the National Gallery of Australia’s collection.

My response to McCahon's work is through the concepts of place, identity, cultural memory and spirituality and his New Zealand's artistic traditions and critical practices'. His work was grounded in the landscapes of New Zealand and it was the landscape that served predominantly as a vehicle for his propositions regarding the relation of the individual to physical and religiousl worlds.

This is the Annie Lebowitz image from her Miley Cyrus photo shoot for Vanity Fair that is causing all the fuss ---- "topless" photos of hitherto wholesome 15-year-old Disney star Miley Cyrus.

Lebowitz has portrayed Little Miss Innocence, role model to six-year-old girls as a provocative sex kitten. The Family values crowd are outraged.

Isn't sex what celebrity culture is all about? Isn't this a standard VF pouty pictures of an ingénue? Isn't Cyrus 15 and so becoming, or is, a sexual person? What's new about a girl's sexuality being used to sell magazines. Hasn't the Miley/Hannah been used to sell everything from bedsheets to karaoke machines?