O’Malley says that he found the idea of Hundreds, arbitrary divisions on a paper map, fascinating. He adds that “before arriving at Pekina, I bought a topographical map, worked out the Hundred boundary, and decided to photograph the country by walking around the Hundred. As well as taking photographs for use in our collective project (a live online performance in a stone dance hall at Pekina) I wanted to get to know this strange, little used road by photographing precisely on each half hour of my walk whether or not there was something there that seemed visually interesting.”
This conceptual art work was premised on walking in stages for well over 19 hours. O’Malley was dropped off each day where he had stopped the day before and re-acquainted himself with the road. He walked about 75 km in temperatures in the high 30s or more and completed his circuit at John Mannion’s windmill.
O’Malley had planned to turn this walk into a book in which each page would show the half hourly photo, compass direction of the angle of the photo, the ever extending red line of the road unfolding, and the altitude. However, new projects began and A Walk Around the Pekina Hundred’ went on the back burner with only one page competed in 1999. It was nearly 15 years before he started working on the project again in 2014.
He scanned old negatives and tried to make sense of information he had scribbled in a red and black covered book whilst walking.
On a planned trip to Adelaide in 2014 he decided to revisit Pekina to retrace most of the walk, this time by car. This was over quite a few hours, stopping at each place to look and to record GPS coordinates with new technology. O’Malley says that the landscape was still so [South] Australian, the Pekina Hall was still an amazing building, the Pekina pub still did big counter teas, and the road still unfolded from the hall.
He adds in the process he re-acquainted himself with “my road”, and adds that with “pleasure I noticed that the Wynflete church was restored, and with disappointment I realised I wasn’t getting a beer at Tarcowie. That pub had shut down.”
Continuing he says that “fifteen years ago we got to know each other well over 19 hours. All the way I listened to its assuring, crunchy, underfoot murmurings, drowned sometimes by buzzing flies. I sometimes saw it change direction to take me an easier way between hills, or to take me closer to a photograph. It took me to shady places to give me a break from the sun. It pointed out interesting things just to the side.”
This conceptual walking/photography project, which explores our relationship with ‘place’, can be understood as art photography after conceptual art. No doubt the book’s ‘dead-pan’ images and rejection of subjective expression would have situated it at the Shimmer Festival of Photography firmly within the traditional photographic binary of works as conceptual or pictorial photography, aesthetic or anti-aesthetic.
The photographic culture in South Australia is firmly located with the pictorial photographic tradition, rather than the idea-based art of the 1960s, or the appropriation tactics of the 1980s. South Australian photography currently favours the large-scale, pictorial and frequently digital, color photography that has dominated photographic art since the 1990s. ‘A Walk Around the Pekina Hundred’ is a challenge to the influential idea that photography became art precisely in its turn away from conceptualism through the embrace of digital technology to make large-scale, pictorial prints. What is disclosed by dead-panning the material–ie., a mode of rhetorical deliver defined as flat and emotionless , or a mood of a grey everyday — is allowing the road and its surrounds to speak for itself.
‘A Walk Around the Pekina Hundred’ is a walking art in the sense that the mode of art making is specific to the experience of going for a walk. It is walking as a mode of art practice, and the concept suggested by ‘A Walk Around the Pekina Hundred’ is that artists design a specific walking experience that creates an exchange between the walking body, the landscape and the other bodies it encounters there (both incidentally and by design). This walking art is situated within an acknowledgement of the ordinary, with its acts of acceptance, receptiveness and responsiveness that disclose our affective relationship to the world.
In being other to digital technology being used to make large-scale, pictorial prints, A Walk Around the Pekina Hundred’ opens up a way for photographers to be together with objects in the world they inhabit. This, in turn, opens up various possibilities that can be explored might heighten our sensitivity to the world we are walking within. This heightened sensitivity–a delay in judgment?– involves a sense of openness, readiness and equanimity, and it suggests new pathways for art photographers to explore in their projects.