rethinking documentary photography

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.  

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This  photo of my  old Cambo 5x7 was taken by Stuart Murdoch  whilst we were on location in North Melbourne in the late afternoon in May 2018. At this particular moment of the photo session  I had briefly wandered over to the other side of the railway bridge  to scope the old  bridge and the city  with my Sony digital camera. 

At the time we  were in the process of making some photos for our  forthcoming  exhibition  at the Atkins Photo Lab for the 2018  SALA  festival about old industrial Melbourne.  The exhibition now has a title: Collaborations: Interrogating Melbourne's Changing Urban Landscape. This is collaboration in a substantive sense: subject matter, documentary photography of the object   as interpretation rather than depiction,  and  helping to develop an Australian tradition of a topographical understanding of  the human/nature relationship.  

 I have decided to  include some of my older Melbourne photographs in the exhibition, such as this one:  

The groups name  for the purposes of SALA is Australian Topographics with its references back to the American large format photography of the 1860s and the 1970s. The Australian reference is to David Stephenson's   photographs of Tasmanian dams  starting in  the 1980s,  which he interpreted in terms of the  technological sublime.  This interpretation of the sublime builds on, and works within, this body of work about the American construction of awesome technology--eg., railroads, pipelines, bridges and rocket launches at Cape Canaveral. 

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