As mentioned in this earlier post on this low key blog about documentary photography Stuart Murdoch and myself are having a collaborative exhibition at the Atkins Photo Lab for South Australia's 2018 SALA festival. Two outtakes for the SALA exhibition from Stuart's extensive archive can be seen here on his blog. The exhibition is about an old industrial Melbourne that is rapidly disappearing in a post-industrial world.
The large format black and white and colour photographs in the Collaborations exhibition are underpinned by the conceptual framework of the industrial sublime rather than the industrial picturesque. An issue that comes to the fore with presenting these photographs of the industrial sublime is: 'how can a topographical approach to photography represent the industrial sublime'? How can photography represent the whole social context of capitalism's industrial modernity in Melbourne, after the demise of the long shadow cast by Greenbergian formalist modernism?
Though the sublime is a traditional category of aesthetics, it has recently seen a resurgence of interest beyond the passing whims of artistic fashion. The sublime flashes up when confronted by an experience that is immense, its scope is difficult to comprehend, and the disparities allow the emergence of new voices. The sublime indicates a breakdown and an inability to represent.