Catalogue of stereoscopic views.

"... a newly revised Catalogue of our Stereoscopic Views ..."--Page 1.

Centelhas de uma cidade turística nos cartões-postais de Jaeci Galvão (1940-1980)

The postcard is a medium that has gained popularity at the time that the picture was linked to its support. It circulated favoring mainly the views of the cities and composed a triad between landscape, photography and tourism. The visuality that loads is among signs of representations, relationships, forms of collective consciousness and ways of seeing the world. In Natal, the photographer Jaeci Emereciano Galvão registered urban and social transformations focusing on interventions that emphasized urban centres as social space and progress and nature as a space for contemplation and enjoyment. They are images with social and cultural issues very clear, since the picture is from a process of creation that is all about choices and decisions about what deserves to be photographed. Therefore, the aim of this research by investigating the role of photographs evidenced in Jaeci’s postcards, with a view to inclusion of tourism in the spaces of Natal and the visuality assumed in the context of their own identity. The theoretical framework that makes up the discussions about the landscape, the city's tourism and photographic representation in postcards emerged from the literature of Schama (1996), Corbin (1989), Cosgrove (1998), Benjamin (1987), Kossoy (2003; 2006; 2009) and Souza Martins (2009), which gave grants to interpret and understand the symbolic construction presented in the postcards. Methodologically the work was done through research in archives, newspapers, postcards of the survey, interviews, iconographic and iconological analyses proposed by Kossoy. At the end, it was concluded the Jaeci Galvão’s postcards established themselves as essential elements for symbolic landscapes of tourism in Natal.

37° Sur a 19° Norte: Fotografía contemporánea de Australia

Curatorial considerations, aims and objectives:The title for this exhibition (37 ° South to 19 ° North) refers to the Latitude of Melbourne, Australia and Cuernavaca, Mexico.My curatorial objective for making such a reference to the geographical was to invoke a sense of both distance and connection between the two locations of Australia and Mexico and to also create a sense of sharing, not only between our distant landscapes and cultures but also between the feelings and emotions that we all experience in response to the places in which we live out the moments which make up our daily lives.In developing this project I considered the work of more than 35 contemporary Australian photographers and finally selected 15 photographers (including myself). Most of these artists have or have had close connection to Melbourne and to the southern/eastern line of Australian continent. The final selection ranged from Hobart to Maroochydore and one artist who had lived in Melbourne for many years but was now living in Mexico. These photographers (and the specific works) were selected because their long term creative practice captures a sense of location (place and space) with a deep introspective sensibility which I feel offers a viewer a personal and softly spoken vision of some particular aspect of an Australian location, be that exterior landscape or interior place and a sense of unique connection to such places. These images are not documents but rather representations of feelings, stories, memories and dreams which emerge in the milieu of our inhabitants.In selecting the works, careful consideration was also given to diversity of approaches to photographic practice in conjunction to thematic content. Formats and media included black and white, pin hole photography, toy camera, large format (both 4” x 5” and 10”x 8”), phone camera, various digital camera images and other experimental approaches. The local art scene in Cuernavaca is very strong and there is a strong interest in photography. This is partially due to the number of local arts schools and universities which offer studies in photography as well as the political dimension regarding Mexican art in general - as a tool of both political media, reportage and documentary work, photography is a significant medium for many of the people who would be visiting the exhibition. I therefore felt it was important to address the diversity of approaches to the medium which are currently being explored by Australian practitioners.The City Museum of Cuernavaca provided two large walls and some smaller sections of side walls on both the grounds level and the upper level of the main museum galleries for exhibition.The works were arranged with a simple thematic structure. Top level, left to right, then bottom level, left to right starting with images which presented a sense of wilderness and landscape (which were also quite abstract and reductive) to more representational landscape images moving to landscape with small figures (people) emerging within the images (Ash Kerr) to landscapes with larger figures and the emerging presence of man-made elements to urban landscapes and then to interior urban scapes and finally to interior locations with people and finally finishing on the metaphorical image by Harry Nankin of Bogong Moths and the politics of climate change. (It is also interesting to note that the migration path of the Bongong moth matches well the distribution of the artists selected for this project)Broadly speaking the images started outside with broad landscape to intimate interior locations. With these works a great deal of personal content from each photographer was presented. Most artists chose to present 3 large format images while some only presented 2 images. Other graphic and visual elements were considered in the final placement of the images.It must also be noted that the artists selected ranged broadly from very highly established and significant local artists to mid-career/younger establishing artist to some lesser known and emerging artists. From a curatorial perspective I feel this is offers the possibility of what I shall term, a more balanced representation of the local Australian practice and it provides a context in which both established and emerging artists / works must engage on a dialogue, within the exhibition. I believe it also placing the curatorial premise on the strength of the work rather than on whom the artists are and their status. It also supports the younger emerging artists and provides a less formal and predictable outcome for the established artists and for as a collective presentation as a whole.

Fallen hut #1, forest pathway, fallen hut #2 (a photographic triptych)

Three large format photographic images which form part of an ongoing documentation of old huts in a Poplar forest at Vaughan near Castlemaine in central Victoria. I have been documenting this location and these abandoned huts for fifteen years. These images were made between April and June 2015 and were presented in the exhibition titled: 37° Sur a 19° Norte: Fotografía contemporánea de Australia.

Tenerbrosity scene 1

Tenerbrosity Scene 1, is a large format photographic artwork. The work visually explores memory through the recollection of incidents and the fragility of truth. This is situated within the practice of landscape photography in a post-colonial framework. In Scene 1 of 2, a woodland closed shot is presented for the audience. The scene was shot at night in a forest, and provides a focus on the details of trees and leaves, branches and an emerging blackness that surrounds the scene. The journey has taken a strange turn in Tenerbrosity, with suggestions of the strange and unfamiliar, like a fragment or a moment, attempting to pull everything back together, somehow..somewhere… The size of the work as a large unframed print on canvas, actively seeks a physical engagement with the audience via a centrality of vision. The artwork hangs a metre out from the wall and the work sways in the breeze, to ensure the audience is located at a site for the production of meaning and this captures a mixed reality, between artwork, vision, audience and experience. This is achieved to engage with the multi-sequential narratives surrounding traces of memories and decay visually and theoretically traversed throughout the series. This is part of the ongoing exploration of states of the in-between and forms the 1st in a series of 2 artworks. The work is exhibited in the Yarra Ranges, because the work explores the narratives of the decay of memory experienced in this location. Exhibiting here allows a cyclic dialogue with notions of place, home, longing and loss.

Tenerbrosity scene 2

Tenerbrosity Scene 2, is a large format photographic artwork. The work visually explores memory through the recollection of incidents and the fragility of truth. This is situated within the practice of landscape photography in a post-colonial framework. In Scene 2 of 2, a woodland closed shot is presented for the audience. The scene was shot at night in a forest, and provides a focus on the details of trees and leaves, branches and an emerging blackness that surrounds the scene. The journey has taken a strange turn in Tenerbrosity, with scene 2 suggesting a mirror or reflection, a duplicate of or duality in combination with Scene 1. The size of the work as a large unframed print on canvas, actively seeks a physical engagement with the audience via a centrality of vision. The artwork hangs a metre out from the wall and the work sways in the breeze, to ensure the audience is located at a site for the production of meaning and this captures a mixed reality, between artwork, vision, audience and experience. This is achieved to engage with the multi-sequential narratives surrounding traces of memories and decay visually and theoretically traversed throughout the series. This is part of the ongoing exploration of states of the in-between and forms the 2nd in a series of 2 artworks. The work is exhibited in the Yarra Ranges, because the work explores the narratives of the decay of memory experienced in this location. Exhibiting here allows a cyclic dialogue with notions of place, home, longing and loss.

The photography and the motion landscape in the urban expressway

A new kind of photographic representation, called movement-image is proposed and discussed to record the visual experience of the journey through urban highways. It consists of performing long exposure photographic shots while the track is traversed, thus registering a time-panorama which includes landscape signs and inner spaces of the ways involved. This proposal is linked to the limitations of representing these expressways, if they are understood as structures of instrumental origin, where the resulting experience comes from moving at high speed through the territory. In al almost all cases the aesthetic approach or urban integration with the city and landscape are excluded. In this sense, although such structures may be an opportunity to collect, build and colonize the urban landscape, the lack of adequate representation of the phenomenon causes a difficulty in its understanding and transformation. The options for representation using photography is assumed, knowing its own particular tradition in the use of long exposures, for the expression of the mobile, and the multiple visual attention, divided or weakened.

Representing places never visited: Landscape and the diasporic imagination

While landscape photography’s complicity with the colonial possession of new territory has been substantially discussed and well understood, this paper considers the role of the European landscape as the focus of diasporic desire. The interdisciplinary project, S2Q/Good Blood began as a social history map of Scandinavian and Nordic migration to Queensland in the nineteenth century, incorporating archival material from local collections with visual field trip data gathered in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. In 2011, some of this material found its way into the installation work, 'my mother is water, my father is wood'. What emerged from this experiment was an imaginary landscape, melding its loci through original photography and video footage in tandem with stock imagery and historical material. This juxtaposition reinforced the represented landscape as a narrative landscape and evidence of the performativity of belonging. This practitioner reflection utilizes Lynette Russell’s research into landscape archaeology to consider the significance of relationships with landscapes that are “not always empirically demonstrable.”

Landscape painting

The images in this exhibition were based on questioning relationships between the histories of painting and photography, which helped to establish the indexical references that became both photography’s most powerful attribute and most subtle illusion. Debates over the objectivity or subjectivity of the photograph and the uneasy relationship between painting and photography, as played out in the history of art, have been brought into sharp relief with the contemporary proliferation of digital images. The digital realm of photography gives rise to a general and relative skepticism of verity, but it can be argued that to artist/photographers, this representational malleability is precisely what their purpose becomes. In researching current issues of the indexical in photographic practice, landscape provides a potent vehicle for exploring issues of representation and illusion, the nexus of painting and photography, and the digital realm. One of contemporary photography’s most resonant themes is a return to pictorial subjects and methods, including a renewed interest in floribunda, still life and landscape. The resulting deconstruction and reconstruction of landscape ‘painting’ in this body of work- the monochrome, linear abstraction, painterly representationalsism and pictorialist detail is presented as a perceptual, aesthetic and digital act. The exhibition incorporates landscape painting’s simplicity and complexity, photography’s significance of representation and minimalist aesthetics in an over-mediated world.

Shifting ground in some Australian photography

This is a report of a practice-as-research project. The chapter outlines McArdle's discoveries of means by which the pre-conscious processes of binocular vision and steropsis can be made visible in an effect which with one-eyed vision renders the scene 3-dimensional.

In the book's introduction editor Mehigan writes "[The] will to creation is only assayable once we estimate the role of the observer in the construction of space. McArdle's contribution, in engaging with the question of the animating presence of the observer focuses not just on what is caught in the lens of the photographer at the moment of depiction, but how the photographer's movement through space is the 'force field' that insinuates itself into the landscape and enters into a reciprocal relationship with it. The schematism of Euclidean geometry, for this reason, cannot account for the truth of the photographer's images; McArdle's metaphors are singularly non-Euclidean in their description of how objects are held together in the imaginative space of mental awareness."

Double horizons : shifting figure and ground in some Australian photography

Focus on photography: Wilkins, Clayfield, Sirianni

Curated by Liza McCosh, an exhibition of photographic artworks by John Wilkins, Peter Clayfield and Mick Sirriani, exhibited at SCOPE Galleries, Warrnambool.  The exhibition surveyed a range of processes and included portraiture, landscape, urbanscape and experimental photography on paper and aluminium.

Stillness and movement: a bodily approach to photography

My paper will address both Duration and temporality of the ‘still’ imageand Sensorial and bodily experience of photography through a discussion of a recent body of work ‘Fly Rhythm’, a series of photographs and video works exhibited in a gallery context.By acknowledging the inter-relationship between the body and the camera my project seeks to challenge a perceived separation between performance and photography. Fly Rhythm was conceived through a performative somatic process. Through using a custom made camera I was able to negotiate time and space to create a visual drawing of movement and stillness together in photography. The resultant images are discussed as a notation of body movement – a record of bodily history enabled through a self imposed discipline of learning to read light.I initially constructed a human size camera to understand how photography works. Spending time inside observing the way light moves and affects the formation of sight is also a way of embodying the act of photography. I responded by making a bespoke camera that enabled light to be captured during extended periods while moving. My project is dependent upon a self-imposed discipline of intuiting light’s strength and erratic changes, a skill developed by making analogue prints while inside a camera obscura. Once I had developed an ability to read light’s changes and gain an understanding of camera mechanics I made durational recordings moving through the landscape on Bruny Island Tasmania and industrial sites in Melbourne, photographs exhibited as part of Fly Rhythm. I will discuss these prints in context with the idea that light is a conduit through which past and present fuse together in a bodily act of photographing and processing images.I will explore durational aspects of photography by discussing light’s relative motion while taking photographs without using the viewfinder or composing images in the traditional way. Rather, the camera at the end of my arm is directed through how I read light therefore a choreography notated in the prints – a kind of body signatureMy practice enables a new the way of seeing, in a spontaneous hand held process creating a sense of embodiment. By analyzing process my paper will consider how the body together with analogue and 21st century digital technology coalesce cross-disciplinary practice combining visual art, performance and photographic disciplines.I also explored limitations of digital light in contrast with ‘natural’ light by a making a gamut of dissolving colour determined by the software based on two pixels. Projected into the ambient light ‘Glide’ is an 11minute durational work installed at the Substation Contemporary Art Space in Melbourne Australia.