rethinking documentary photography

Gawler: empty shops

I recently walked the main street of Gawler north of Adelaide. It is on the Sturt highway -- the A20 which is an Australian national highway. It is where the North Para River joins the South Para River to form the Gawler River.

What used to be seen as a country town in the mid-north region of South Australia is now probably the northern fringe of the city of Adelaide, as it is only 40 kilometres from Adelaide's CBD, just north of Elizabeth and is the main gateway to the Barossa Valley.

I was struck by the number of empty shops when I was walking around. The township itself was full of people and energy. It had a buzz that was such contrast to the empty shops.

old school documentary

Homelessness is now very visible in Adelaide's CBD.

For a few days this week I have been walking around the city streets early in the morning (ie., between 6.30--8.30 am) and I couldn't help but notice that there are a lot of (white) people sleeping rough.

They are sleeping in secluded corners in alleyways or secluded spaces on side streets that provide them with some shelter from the increasing autumn rains. They leave their possessions there during the day and I see them the following morning. Their particular spot functions as their space in a public space. It cannot be safe living on the streets and health must be a serious issue for the street homeless. .

Without a home (ie., not having a secure and safe homeI) means that you can’t make appointments, you’ve got no way of structuring your life, you’ve got nothing that’s safe. Without a home, you’re living day by day with anyone you run into.

post-photography?

A common interpretation of both contemporary photography is that photography is in a transition period (eg.,drones, smartphones, webcam, Google Street View) and the significance of the emergence of digital technology in photography in the early 21st century is that it is best characterised as the post-photographic . The term post-photographic is too limited to make sense of 'photography in transition' as its central concern of the post photographic is primarily about the peril of manipulated appearances, even though manipulation has always been a common practice of the modern uses of photography.

The post-photographic interpretation holds that the analogue photographic image offered the promise of objective representation. It is then argued that this is the main reason why, for the better part of the last two centuries, analogue photography has been our most adequate instrument for documenting the world, its objects and ourselves. Photography's authority lay in its matter-of-factness; i.e., in the apparently privileged relationship between analogue photographs and the world.: ie., a photograph is the causal product of a

mechanical photo-chemical process, Photographic theory found in the notion of indexicality a way to preserve and defend the documental value of photographs.

However, the technological developments of the last two decades made possible the transformation of analogue photography into digital information whose images are not bound by physical constraints other than the capacity of a hard drive. Digital photographic images cannot be described as indexical sign, and given that the plausibility of photography as a document has always rested on its unique indexical relation to the world, its supplantation by images lacking this characteristic hinders photography's traditional authority.

Memories: alley, Bank St

This scoping picture of a small alley off Bank St was made whilst I recently wandered around Adelaide's CBD in the late morning. I had driven the car from Encounter Bay to Seaford Meadows, caught the train into the city, had a coffee in Leigh St and then started wandering around.

I drifted into Bank St from Leigh St as I was looking to see if the cafes were still closed post Covid-19. I had a sense that the street life was returning to the city, and I was curious to see if the cafe's in the pedestrian friendly side streets were starting to re-open. Some in Leigh St were still closed and I wondered if this was also the case in Bank St.

at Garden Island

On my last trip to Adelaide I decided to return to exploring the Port Adelaide region. As I was down that way to see the chiropet with Kayla, I decided to spend some time scoping around Garden Island area. It has been ages since I have been there, and I wanted to return to the ship graveyard that I photographed in the 1980s.

Most of the ships in the graveyard can only be accessed by kayak. I was in luck that day as I was able to access part of the ship graveyard due to the low tide. It was overcast, which is what I'd wanted for the photos.

What had changed? Surprisingly, not that much. The Sunbeam was still there, even if its hull was more decayed. The mangroves were heavily infested with mosquitos so I didn't hang around trying to see if I could access the other ships from the river bank.

the Torrens Island Quarantine Station

The previous post (in May 2020) ended with the question about how I was going to carry this project on, given that SA's borders with Victoria are closed, due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the extensive community transmission in Melbourne. The question was:

"where does that post-industrial transformation [of Port Adelaide] leave this interlude in the drosscape project? Just wait out the current lockdown in Melbourne? Or continue to explore the Port Adelaide region when I could?"

I then remembered that I had started to revisit Port Adelaide. One occasion was in 2017 when I participated in an organized phototrip to both the old Torrens Island Quarantine Station and to the inside of Hart's Mill at Port Adelaide. This was with a group of friends under the umbrella of the South Australian Maritime Museum at Port Adelaide.

The photos, which had been made with a medium format film camera, had just sat in the archives on my hard drive of the Mac Pro untouched. What they represent is an exploration of the history of Port Adelaide region. The Maritime Museum's organised tours have been postponed in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. There is a sense of historical déjà vu’, in living through the COVID-19 lockdown with what happened a century ago.

Interlude: reconnecting with Port Adelaide

The Covid-19 pandemic has meant that my planned interstate travel in April 2020 to photograph old industrial Melbourne had to be cancelled. SA's borders are closed and Melbourne still has several outbreak Covid-19 hotspots. The national lockdown has meant very limited travel--initially staying at home, exercising in one's postcode and photographing locally. Once the restrictions started to ease in South Australia to allow limited travel within the state's borders, I wondered if I could introduce something new to keep the drosscape project going--ie., I could build on my old Port Adelaide photographs, and then link them to those of industrial Melbourne?

Would that change the nature of this low key project? Would it become a project about memory: a project haunted by the past. If it was possible to photographed the Port anew, then what would that look like and how would it link to the old?

I had photographed the industrial landscape of old Port Adelaide in the 1980s. Then the Port was characterised by obsolescence, decline and grime. What of the present Port Adelaide, which was in the process of being re-branded through an obliteration of the Port's history and its industrial and maritime working class character?

I returned to Port Adelaide after stage 1 of the easing of restrictions, and I wandered around some of the areas where I'd photographed over a decade ago. Though I made the odd photo whilst I was there, I was more or less reconnecting with, and picking up the traces of the photographic past.

The picture below of the Port River estuary is from the archives, and it was the first location that I returned to and checked out. Had anything changed? If so, what? Were there new photographic possibilities?

Not really was my response. I needed to move on.

As I wandered around I kept wondering whether I could re-connect with this archival body of work that was made whilst I was living in Adelaide's CBD. Could I build on the documentary work that I had been doing then? If so, what would be the concept behind the documentary photography of this old industrial area and that of Melbourne? Heritage photography?

at Moonee Ponds Creek

I made a quick, multipurpose road trip to Melbourne via a short detour through the Wimmera Mallee in mid-March (13-19th) 2019 to work on the old industrial Melbourne project.

Multipurpose, as I wanted to reconnect with the Mallee Routes project; to spend time with my sister at Safety Beach; continue photographing around Nth Melbourne; check out the world of photobooks at both the Melbourne Art Book Fair and the 2018 ANZ Photobook Awards; and have a look at some possible gallery spaces at Abbotsford Convent to continue to exhibit the ongoing collaborative Melbourne drosscape work with Stuart Murdoch.

For the drosscape work I had caught the Metro train to the Nth Melbourne railway station from Frankston. I then walked around Nth Melbourne with the 5x4 gear in a supermaket trolley for 5-6 hours--the gear is too heavy to carry for that length of time. I initially walked along Laurens St, down Arden Street, then made my way along the Moonnee Ponds Creek Trail, which is part of the Capital City Trail.

This is one of the digital images that I had made on an earlier trip, and it was one that I had planned to re-photograph with the 5x4 Linhof Technika IV. It was this spot that I was walking to.

However, the promised cloud cover had gone by the time I arrived, and the light in the mid-afternoon was too sunny and contrasty for me. I consequently continued walking along the Moonnee Ponds Creek Trail, crossed over a very busy Footscray Rd, and spent some time exploring under and around City Link in an area adjacent to Enterprise Road.

revisiting Nth Melbourne

Whilst we--Suzanne, myself and our two standard poodles (Kayla and Maleko) --- were in Melbourne in late November for family reasons I was able to do a little bit of photographic scoping around the North Melbourne drosscapes before the cloud cover evaporated. This scoping was to find sites for a future large format photo session in the autumn of 2019 so as to continue the topographic photography of old industrial Melbourne that I am working in association with Stuart Murdoch.

As it was early summer, what was substantial early morning cloud cover on the Morning Peninsula, quickly disappeared over the city in the early afternoon. That meant the end of any photography scoping for the day. I was wanting to see this Industrial Melbourne Festival so Stuart and I decided to check out The Substation in Newport and the Trocadero Art Space in Footscray, but, unfortunately, we were too late. The Industrial Festival had been and gone. So we looked at these art spaces as possibilities for future exhibitions for our industrial Melbourne work in 2019/2020 as we wanted to build on our 2018 exhibition in Adelaide at Atkins Photo Lab by exhibiting in Melbourne.

reflections on the post documentary

Viewing the various images of industrial Melbourne in the initial Collaborations exhibition at Atkins Photo Lab in Adelaide opened up the theoretical project of rethinking of documentary photography to the idea that these representations are a form of industrial archaeology. What appeared from reading these photos was a sense that the photos appeared as an excavation of a forgotten, industrial Melbourne in that they were a retrieval of what has been overlooked as the ruins, detritus or wasteland of industrial Melbourne. Though they enabled us, the viewer, to form a sense of the historical textuality of modernity these archaeological images would not be seen as art by the art institution.

Today the idea of photography as a medium that simply records the world around us seem positively quaint. However, the various images on the white wall of the gallery highlighted how this large format, documentary photography also placed an emphasis on the modernist concern with the basic form of the art object -- ie., the shapes, colours and lines that make up the art work. The emphasis on the basic form of the image indicate the aesthetic aspect of this documentary style in a topographic mode.

Though the pictures are a form of historical knowledge, the aesthetic dimension moves this documentary photography away from the conventional notions of mechanical representation--capturing the real. This naturalism continues to define photojournalism, the media's reportage tendency to reduce photography to illustration, and conventional understandings of documentary photography. Photographic images are anything but neutral reflections of the wider world or simple traces of a present past. In this return to the past the photos are a form of history making about the uncanny or the unhomely.

The rethinking of documentary photography is also post modernist in the sense that it represents the present as if it were already past--as if it were history. The exhibition highlighted this topographical photography as a historical practice with its inbuilt tensions (or dialectic) between formalism and historicism. It indicates how this photography plays with time and historical distance, representing a moment in the past only to give it over to new interpretations and modes of seeing in subsequent viewings.

Yet contemporary photography is all about,, “interrogating the medium”, which often means shifting it away from documentary towards other, more conceptually driven art forms – abstract painting, sculpture, performance, video installation in a world of of image overload. We now live in a digital world drowning in images with the arrival of the smartphone camera. The numbers are mind-boggling: 350m photographs a day uploaded on Facebook; 95m photographs and videos shared on Instagram daily. The combined number of images shared uploaded on both platforms now exceeds 290bn, while there are 188m daily active users of Snapchat. Artificial technology is just around the corner.

In contrast the industrial Melbourne project is very modest and slow. It works in terms of a series --bridges or freeways or creeks ---so that the images of these found object are connected to one another in an archivalist sense. Seriality can be understood in terms of difference as opposed to sameness, and photographic projects can be seen in terms of longevity as opposed to the instantaneous. As Susan James argues in her Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures Across the Iron Curtain the linking of images in a series forces the establishing of connections and relations. It bounces the gaze from one site to another, to build up meanings across time, thereby giving us a sense of our own industrial history, as well as a perspective on the spaces that we currently inhabit.