Academic literature on the topic 'Landscape photography – Australia – Exhibitions'

With Gdansk artists an approach to the subject of the marine photography, was marked on several levels – artistic, documentary, journalistic and usable. Since 1945 to the first half of the 80s, we notice the popularization of maritime theme in the environment throughout artistic exhibition activities, and the program objectives. Maritime photography or maritime themes in photography? An analysis of the photographic medium in terms of belonging to the art can give the answer to this question. It is also worth considering whether there was „Gdansk School of the Maritime Photography”? The phenomenon of Polish marine art in the case of photography has been strongly emphasized in the Gdansk photography environment. The traditional display of the maritime theme has been broken, and with the approval of the authorities. Shipyard workers and dockers joined to the effigy of the sea people (fishermen, sailors). Photographers began to enter the maritime economy and use the effects of cooperation with maritime institutions for artistic purposes. Thematic exhibitions on shipyards and ports were created showing the sea from a different point of view, from the perspective of land. Socio-political events related to Solidarity stopped the promotion of the sea through the image of a shipyard worker and a shipyard, which became icons of the struggle for freedom. The Gdansk photographic community after the socio-political crisis of the first half of the 1980s, has not yet rebuilt its leading position in the dissemination of the maritime theme in photography on a large scale. Maritime exhibitions still appeared, but mainly on the local level, and the sea was reduced to the landscape understood very traditionally. At the same time photographers of the younger generation were interested in completely different issues of the style and aesthetics of photography. Te slogan „face to the sea” ceased to correspond with new times.

Analyzing relevant and informative sources for acquaintance with modern fine art, catalogs of various art exhibitions, article questions and problems associated with the creation of architectural and landscape compositions are considered from a practical point of view. A significant role in art belongs to the architectural landscape, as a genre variety. Promising types of cities - Veduta (A. Canaletto, V. Bellotto) have become separate types of architectural landscape. The genre of painting is the Veduta, which developed in the eighteenth century in Venice. This is an image of views of the city and its environs. Lead amaze with its accuracy. At that time, such images served as photographs. The requirements for the paintings corresponded to their purpose: the accuracy of the image of objects, down to the smallest detail. With the advent of photography, the requirements for graphic images have lost their relevance. The camera can accurately capture the object, transmit small details better than the artist. The changes that are taking place in modern realistic painting are connected precisely with the appearance of photography. Many modern impressionists, trying to impress the landscape they saw, write sketches with wide, wide strokes. For the sake of such a technique, they ignore many important elements of the landscape in order to maximize the expressiveness of their work. Modern artists working in the realistic direction of the architectural landscape pay attention to color reproduction, color of painting, while paying due attention to drawing, linear perspective and construction. Painting and photography at the present stage are fundamentally different from each other. Painting corresponds to its name - living writing, generalization, typification and stylization of forms, the viewer's impression of lightness, airiness and illumination. Modern realistic painting is modified relative to the painting of the VIII-XIX centuries. This process is due to the technical development of the modern world, the advent of digital photography, new materials for creativity. Picturesque language goes into the language of flowers. Professional art education plays a fundamental role in understanding the landscape as a genre of painting. Education allows you to combine composition, the picturesque effect, which is an innovation in realistic landscape painting, for the complete deep impression of the viewer.

Repeat photography is a technique of detecting changes in the landscape by comparing old and more recent photographs taken at the same place. Information gained is used to detect landscape change as one component of historical ecology. Understanding the causes of any change detected requires additional information. The technique was pioneered in vegetation ecology in Arizona and has since been applied in many other parts of the United States. After a description of the technique, the American experience is reviewed and the problems of detecting change and assigning cause are discussed. The relatively few Australian examples are briefly summarised. There are many limitations of repeat photography, but these can be controlled through a careful approach. Although repeat photography has rarely been used in Australia, it has significant applications in education, in understanding past changes and in helping to help predict future changes in vegetation.

Agricultural landscapes in southern Australia were once dominated by temperate eucalypt woodlands of which only fragmented patches and scattered trees in paddocks remain. This study focuses on the decline of scattered trees in the Mount Lofty Ranges and South East agricultural regions of South Australia. A combination of digitized aerial photography and satellite imagery was used to extend a previous assessment of decline undertaken in the early 1980s and increase the period over which decline was assessed to 58–72 years. A total of 17 049 scattered trees were counted from the earliest time period assessed over 11 sites of which 6 185 trees were lost by 2008 — a 36 % decline. Recruitment of 2 179 trees during this period was evident. Imagery indicates that clearing for agricultural intensification is the primary cause of the decline. A range of management options and policy settings are required to reverse the decline notwithstanding the challenges of implementation at a landscape scale across privately owned land.

Stratified ground-truthing was undertaken within an area of approximately 30 km2 of tropical savanna across an abrupt sandstone escarpment in the monsoon tropics of Australia. Comparison of aerial photographs from 1941 and 1994 had previously revealed a landscape-wide expansion of closed forest and contraction of grassland patches. Good congruence between field measurements and the vegetation classifications from the 1994 aerial photography supported the authenticity of the vegetation changes. The relative abundance of rainforest and non-rainforest tree species also concurred with mapped vegetation transitions. Changes in individual size classes of rainforest species, which are relatively fire sensitive, were consistent with the primacy of fire in controlling the distribution of the closed-forest formation. Fire scars previously mapped from satellite imagery were used to derive a fire activity index for contrasting vegetation transitions. Savannas that had converted to closed forest had lower fire activity than did stable savannas. Conversely, closed forests that converted to savanna had the highest fire activity index. The landscape-wide expansion of rainforest is associated with the cessation of Aboriginal fire management, possibly in conjunction with elevated CO2 and increasing annual rainfall.

Master of Visual Arts
The Dissertation is a meditation on our relationship with this continent and its layered physical and psychological ‘landscapes’. It explores ways in which artists and writers have depicted our ‘thin’ but evolving presence here in the South, and references my own photographic work. The paper weaves together personal tales with fiction writing and cultural, settler and indigenous history. It identifies a uniquely Australian sense of 21st-century disquiet and argues for some modest aesthetic and social antidotes. It discusses in some detail the suppression of focus in photography, and suggests that the technique evokes not only memory, but a recognition of absence, which invites active participation (as the viewer attempts to ‘place’ and complete the picture). In seeking out special essences of place the paper considers the suburban poetics of painter Clarice Beckett, the rigorous focus-free oeuvre of photographer Uta Barth, and the hybrid vistas of artist/gardener Peter Hutchinson and painter Dale Frank. Interwoven are the insights of contemporary authors Gerald Murnane, W G Sebald and Paul Carter. A speculative chapter about the fluidity of landscape, the interconnectedness of land and sea, and Australia’s ‘deep’ geology fuses indigenous spirituality, oceanic imaginings of Australia, the sinuous bush-scapes of Patrick White, and the poetics of surfing. Full immersion is recommended.

The Dissertation is a meditation on our relationship with this continent and its layered physical and psychological ‘landscapes’. It explores ways in which artists and writers have depicted our ‘thin’ but evolving presence here in the South, and references my own photographic work. The paper weaves together personal tales with fiction writing and cultural, settler and indigenous history. It identifies a uniquely Australian sense of 21st-century disquiet and argues for some modest aesthetic and social antidotes. It discusses in some detail the suppression of focus in photography, and suggests that the technique evokes not only memory, but a recognition of absence, which invites active participation (as the viewer attempts to ‘place’ and complete the picture). In seeking out special essences of place the paper considers the suburban poetics of painter Clarice Beckett, the rigorous focus-free oeuvre of photographer Uta Barth, and the hybrid vistas of artist/gardener Peter Hutchinson and painter Dale Frank. Interwoven are the insights of contemporary authors Gerald Murnane, W G Sebald and Paul Carter. A speculative chapter about the fluidity of landscape, the interconnectedness of land and sea, and Australia’s ‘deep’ geology fuses indigenous spirituality, oceanic imaginings of Australia, the sinuous bush-scapes of Patrick White, and the poetics of surfing. Full immersion is recommended.

University of the Witwatersrand Masters Research Report History of Art 31 March 2015
Landscape representations in Western art have long stood as metaphors for power relations inscribed on the earth, encoding imperial aspirations, national identity, poetic and aesthetic experiences about humankind, nature and the environment. However, contemporary landscape imagery of large-scale industrial, and particularly mining sites, have come to signify, pre-dominantly through the medium of photography, meta-narratives that go beyond the political, economic, and environmental power relations historically endemic to landscape representation. Indeed, I suggest they constitute the formation of a sub-genre within the category of Landscape. Mining activities characterise extensive landscape interventions, often with catastrophic results both above and below ground. Perhaps a mined landscape more than any other, exemplifies not only the interwoven political and economic power relations inscribed upon the land, but also testifies to the underlying pathology of the land. Contemporary landscape studies cut across disciplines and go beyond the apprehension of surface, taking into account the geological as well social histories of land, and thus signal a shift in the aesthetic experience of land, both emotionally and intellectually, and consequently the way in which land is made visible. The visualisation of these land sites through imagery has precipitated an interface of aesthetic experience that simultaneously makes visible the politics symbolically encoded in the landscape itself, and the politics that impact viewership and reception. Nevertheless, accompanying the need to make visible those land sites hugely modified by mineral extraction, from both a historical and current perspective, is an unprecedented urgency that is weighted by a political anxiety over future implications of such land interventions. This anxiety is driven by the spectral nature of mined landscapes. Although monumental in scale, mined landscapes are often ‘not seen’, partly because they exist in restricted zones or are located underground, but often they are rendered invisible through a process of assimilation and naturalisation. A case in point has been the collective presence of mine dumps along Johannesburg’s southern periphery, and which, now in the process of being re-cycled, form the focus of my selected case study, an image by British photographer, Jason Larkin and titled Re-Mining Dump 20 (2012). By seeking to bring sites of mining activity into public consciousness, contemporary representations of mined landscapes also mediate current relations between humankind and the natural environment. As an agent of mediation, I propose that an image of a mined landscape functions as an interface. By situating Larkin’s image within a theoretical framework motivated by Jacques Rancière’s politics of aesthetics and Malcolm Andrews and W.J.T. Mitchell’s landscape theory, I proceed with my investigation in the form of a two-part interrogation: one that places emphasis on theory followed by a practical, creative response to Larkin’s image by way of repeat photography of Dump 20 and its surrounds. To demonstrate the concept of interface, I ‘excavate’ the aesthetic experience of Dump 20 as both sensory apprehension and through Rancière’s lens of emancipated viewership. There is an aesthetic quality of the sublime that appears to pervade visual representations of mined landscapes. Described as industrial sublime, toxic sublime or even apocalyptic sublime, the attention-holding quality these images exercise, through a strategy of aesthetic appeal, contribute to a politics of visibility by subversively implicating the viewer as a member of the human race. Global citizenship overrides national identity in these landscape representations, disrupting a sense of belonging with one of complicit participation in the formation of mined landscapes through reliance on mineral extraction for manufacturing consumer goods. Not only do representations of mined landscapes demand a rethink about aesthetic appreciation of landscape imagery and the endemic political connotations implicated in an understanding of landscape. They actively seek to penetrate surface visibility of land by taking into account the very pathology of land as an on going narrative of human and environmental interaction and life continually in process.

This practice-led photographic project re-explores a fragment of bushland a few steps from my home, to the south of nipaluna/Hobart. The bushland comprises most of the valley, which runs down to the Derwent river. It was part of the range of the muwinina people, the original inhabitants displaced by colonial farmers in the 1800s. Traces of the land practices of both remain. The project has its genesis in a four-­decade relationship with this place, which has been fundamental in establishing my connection to land and forming my Tasmanian identity. The key aim of the research was to re-explore the complexity and variety of the unconstrained natural forms of the bush through the agency of colour and to give a sense of the experience of being within the bush. A further key aim was to explore how a white, locally born artist can find a connection and a sense of belonging to this landscape, and develop an authentic and respectful means of depicting it. Now part of the city’s extensive urban-­‐bush fringe—and generally characteristic of the region—land like this tends to be undervalued and unrecognised as a complex and varied environment. It has rarely been the subject of photographic investigation. This project explores some of the characteristics of the locale, noting evidence of human action on the land and changes within the place. A sense of being immersed in the bush was integral to conveying the experience of being there. The resulting photographs often utilise a construction of pictorial space that is not built on a conventional single-­‐point perspective of the vista. On occasion, this led to ambiguities of space and scale. Regular visits facilitated the tracking of temporal and more permanent changes that resulted in the accumulation of multiple viewpoints and the sense of both place and the photographic process as mutable. Text was incorporated in the final printed images to enable a modicum of orientation within the valley and to suggest experiences and stories of place, including the prior custodianship of the muwinina people. The research contextualises my feelings around land and the natural world and how those attitudes and experiences have shaped the ways in which I photograph land. The daily experience of living with an immeasurable vista, interspersed with walking in semi‐enclosed bush with its more relatable scale, has resulted in a preference for smaller spaces and the elements that constitute these places. Jessica Dubow’s descriptions of how Thomas Baines’ views of the landscapes would have come together articulate the realities of experiencing land and the fact that images can never contain more than fragments—of place, time, or truth. Previous knowledge established through my familiarity with place and looking again at my photographs of this bush from the 1970s and 1980s underpin the research. This was further informed by Yi-­‐Fu Tuan and Edward Casey’s writings on place, space, memory, and re-­implacement. The perception of the wildness of the place was measured against Edward Casey’s six traits of wildness, whilst Deborah Bird Rose’s writings provided Indigenous interpretations of wildness and valuable land. Photography is used in the project as a means of observation. This was based on my acceptance of the camera’s ability to record vast amounts of detail and the premise that the photograph is evidential—even as that belief is increasingly challenged by digital technology. Relevant art photographers who have used the medium on a similar premise include Tasmanians Ricky Maynard, David Stephenson, Christl Berg, and Martin Walch. Each has explored different, more distant parts of the state. As a Tasmanian Aboriginal artist, Maynard’s ancestral connection to country provides a counter to any connection to land that I, as a non-­‐Indigenous person, can establish. Geoff Levitus and Ross Gibson provide important context on how non-­‐Indigenous artists’ attempts to represent Australian landscapes is a complex and fraught endeavour, but one that is fundamental to a broader contemporary relationship with the land. American photographers Frank Gohkle and Richard Misrach documented aspects of the American West over decades—of particular interest is their inclusion of the temporal and their familiarity with the places they photograph—whilst Korean-­ American artist Jungjin Lee’s renderings of the Negev Desert conjure ambiguous pictorial spaces that negate single-­‐point perspective. This research contributes to the terrain of contemporary landscape photography through exploring a rarely considered, yet commonplace, Tasmanian landscape. It remarks upon the ordinary materials of landscape—grass, bark, and scrub—in the exploration of a proximate, semi-­wild, transitional landscape. The consideration of such a landscape and the methodologies employed offer an alternative view of what comprises a culturally valuable Antipodean landscape and how a non-­‐Indigenous relationship with land might be developed.

My practice-led project explores the indexical lamination of memory, history, narrative and reality afforded by photography imbued with the illusion of spatial dimensionality. This thesis investigates the notion that far from freezing a ‘slice of time’ photography reanimates perception through sensation rendering duration flexible and elastic. Using the liminal landscape of South Australia as time’s stage, I contend that time is ‘collapsible’, constantly unfolding and repeating. In embracing this temporal flow, I submit that photomedia becomes our most compelling connection to time itself, as lived experience. It is this connection that can act as an ethical agent of change for the betterment of the landscape in which we live. The project includes work created in South Australia, the ACT, the United States and the Outer Hebrides and Shetland Islands of Scotland. It includes artefacts photographed in the Adelaide Civic Collection, The South Australian Museum and the National Museum of Australia.

This chapter concerns the way in which the incessant and exponential use of photography in social media, as a means to form and visually communicate experiences, not only permeates our lives, but also shapes our experience of the world. On the basis of the visual research outputs and findings in the form of the exhibition Norwegian Sublime: Landscape Photography in the Age of the iPhone (Frank Moran Memorial Hall Gallery, Brisbane, Australia), this chapter is an in depth look at our contemporary aesthetic experience of nature and the world around us, through photography and Instagram in particular. Drawing on Susan Sontag and Alva Nöe, this chapter discusses how the digital, social media landscape and our addiction to it does more than merely amplify dissociative seeing. It makes dissociative seeing a new normal.

Photography plays important, but undervalued and misunderstood, roles in how modern urban humans relate to nature and how nature is mediated to us, forming our perceptions and national identity. Typically landscape photography depicts nature aesthetically as sublime, picturesque and beautiful. Photographs have been powerful raising awareness of sustainability and communicating political messages. The chapter reviews the influence of two great Australian wilderness photographers, Olegas Truchanas and Peter Dombrovskis, as well as Edith Cowan University's (ECU) Photography for Environmental Sustainability Competition. In conjunction with World Environment Day, the university invited students to submit photographs that showcase the principles and practices of environmental sustainability. This chapter describes the history, purposes and impact of photography and the competition. Starting as an engagement partnership between the environment coordinator, academics and the Perth Centre for Photography, it is now an international competition across Australia and New Zealand, not exclusive to photography students, hosted by Australasian Campuses Towards Sustainability (ACTS).

In October 1949, in the closing month of the Greek Civil War, a young soldier named Pandelis Klinkatsis was killed stepping on a landmine in Northern Greece. Pandelis was my uncle. The announcement of his death devastated his immediate family including my mother Sophia. I focus this chapter on the individual story of the loss of my uncle and my mother’s grief to cast a wider canvas on the emotions of war and their enduring legacies. This story explores the repercussions of war such as migration, the impact on sibling and romantic love, absence and separation during and after war. It examines the implications of these displacements in writing an emotional history of war. Such a history is typically conveyed through oral storytelling, and oral history forms the basis of the narrative. But there are two other ways in which the memory and emotion of war experience are kept alive in a transnational world. The first expression is in the form of photography, the second is the role grave sites play in the nexus between mourning and memory over time. Pandelis’s story takes us to Greece, Austria, America, and Australia. I argue that it encapsulates the complex geographical and emotional fragments created by war, which are manifest in love and death, mourning and memory, in a transnational context across four countries. Both the Second World War and the Greek Civil War created a landscape of emotions—the legacies of which are indelible—and continue to the present day.