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Autumn Leaves, 120 negative, Mount Lofty Botanic Garden
Also known as Death Before Winter, this image was shot using the ‘pull process’. It is a technique I employ often, and it’s part of the fun of shooting on film. I deliberately overexpose the shot and then underdevelop the negative, yielding greater shadow and highlight detail.
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South Australian Dreamscape, 35mm slide, Eyre Peninsula
Quietude is the antagonist of the photographer because it dares you to break the silence by pushing the (relatively) loud shutter button on the camera. You push the button, wanting to make a photograph. But a still photo cannot record that silence, it can never reproduce that sound of silence. Feeling slightly mercenary, you slink away from the scene, defeated, because quietude has won the day, knowing that you and your camera could only partly represent what it was really like to be there.
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Fog Over Coorong, 35mm slide
There are many images in the book shot in fog. It’s one of those things the camera gods send occasionally and if I’m there when it happens I burn through multiple rolls of slide film. If I’m really lucky there might be a slightly obscured moon rising into frame.
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Reedy Creek, 120 negative
In the first months of 2020, bushfires stalked the nation and it was difficult to find a place away from the catastrophic flames and smoke. I decided to travel east of the Mount Lofty Ranges to escape the madness and death. As I took this shot I wondered to myself, ‘What could possibly happen next?’ We now all know what happened next.
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Younghusband Feeling, digital SLR
One of the hardest things about landscape art is finding elevation, or higher ground. The Younghusband Peninsula offers no such thing, so I shoot those landscapes with a more Asian aesthetic, ie top to bottom rather than the classical ‘western movie’ visual reading which is traditionally left to right. The image becomes more about a kind of block formalism rather than multiple ‘objects in a frame’. Much of my landscape work revolves around this concept.
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After Rain, digital SLR, Pernatty Lagoon
In a La Nina year the northern parts of the state often received huge downpours. I was on the road with local theatre identity Catherine Fitzgerald; she had asked me to shoot images for her upcoming major commissioned work titled DRY. The brief was simple: shoot landscapes that speak of drought, desperation and a kind of postapocalyptic weather event that had led to humanity’s demise due to lack of rain. It rained for the entire shoot.
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Dust Bowl 2019, digital SLR, Borrika
One of the catastrophic choices made last century was the one which involved the mass clearing of parts of the Mallee region to facilitate cereal cropping. Since childhood I have seen this Steinbeckian scenario depicted multiple times: a wicked wind blows in from the north and tears away the topsoil, wreaking havoc for farmers who then must contend with the nightmare spectre of banks foreclosing on them due to crop failure and debt. A terrible, heart-wrenching scenario.
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Starline Drive-In, 120 negative, O’Halloran Hill
For a while during the first Covid lockdown in South Australia, the chatter in social media commentariat revolved around the rebirthing of drive-ins as Covid-safe entertainment venues. So I visited all the old screens that hadn’t yet been rebirthed as suburbs. I thought about my parents and all the baby boomers who frolicked at these places of sin, away from the prying eyes of parents.
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First Light, 120 negative, Cleland Conservation Park
A myth about South Australia is that it never rains. The truth is that the state has such a diverse array of weather and its effects that film-makers flock here because of that diversity. I recently spoke to a visiting producer from LA who had viewed the book. She said earnestly and sans irony that she wanted to move her entire family here so they could ‘live in the woods for a while, and then the desert, off the grid, be close to nature and take photos of sharks and wombats and stuff’. Playing along, I replied earnestly that SA has all that and more.
