In 2011, I met local photographer and blogger Gary Sauer-Thompson, and a field trip with him, on 1 August 2012, resulted in me preparing a little photographic essay on the salt pans of Dry Creek (The Path to Salt is available from blurb.com). One of those images, printed large, won the Photography section prize in the 2019 Caring for the Planet exhibition’s Solar Art Prize.
Gary and I determined over the following years to do a series of books on local art photography, the first being Abstract Photography, which focused on poetics in contemporary practice and the experimental aspects of photographic output of post-war creatives in Adelaide. We worked around what the Art Gallery of South Australia had done with A Century in Focus, and sparked off an exhibition on abstract photography mounted by the Gallery at Monash University in Melbourne. I subsequently sold several images at the Abstract Photography exhibition that coincided with the launch of the book, at the Centre for Creative Photography in Marleston, in 2016. (The book is available on Blurb). A follow-up project on Adelaide art photographers of the late 20th century was much larger, and longer in gestation, but finally was released in April 2020.
These publishing projects intruded on my capacity to pursue photography as much as I would have liked, but it led to me realising I needed to better organise and cull my copious material of over 100,000 images and provide some kind of selection for any future exhibition projects or for posterity, as I found age and health concerns catching up with me. I had lost a few months of images here and there in computer and drive failures but the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown provided an opportunity to reassess and archive; to discover a number of overlooked files; and to re-edit some images.