Sauer-Thompson has been using large format for decades. His walks began with his poodles, as he wandered the urban streets of Bowden. They would lead him down alleys he wouldn’t have ventured into voluntarily and leaning into the dog’s whims cultivated opportunities for happenstance and discovery. Over time, (and a relocation to the coastline of Victor Harbour) the spectatorship he felt in the city has given way to a protracted sense of the familiarity with the region. It is work created by looking in rather than looking out. Of art providing a way of ‘being in the world’ rather than simply looking at it, and where embracing photography as a literal enterprise is to completely misunderstand the medium.
The effect of looking at the works is one of companionship. The figures in the photographs loom, rest, ache. They tell stories, and their voices overshadow the momentary presence of the artist, reaching toward a long conversation with the viewer. The agency of the photograph invites a multiplicity of interpretations. As I stand in their presence, I am reminded of places I’ve walked, of things I’ve seen. Without really thinking, I am cataloging ‘feelings’ present within a multitude of experiences, in which I have felt a particular kind of calm. At this point, it becomes ridiculous to attribute such a/effects to the artist, the photograph, or myself independently. It is the conflation of exchange within a shared experience that speaks to the idea of being-with and within Country. As Ngarinyin Law Man and Elder, Banggal David Mowaljarlai recounted to photographer Jutta Malnic in 1985.
” You go out now, see animals moving, see trees, a river. You are looking at nature and giving it your full attention, seeing all its beauty. Your vision has opened and you start learning now. When you touch them, all things talk to you, give you their story…You understand that your mind has been opened to all those things because you are seeing them; because your presence and their presence meet together and you recognise each other. These things recognise you. They give their wisdom and their understanding to you when you come close to them…When you recognise it, it gives you strength – a new flow.”(6)
Like his counterpart in the exhibition, Adam Dutkiewicz approaches photography using a digital camera as a sketch book. Where Sauer-Thompson returns with a large format camera, Dutkiewicz extends his engagement through the collection of multiple images (at times, hundreds in a single excursion). In studio he pours over the results and aligns his choices with his penchant for abstraction.
Trained as an abstract painter, Dutkiewicz is exploring a different conversation, one between texture, colour and form. It is photography by deconstruction that serves the desire to share something with his audience that most of us walk past every day. Dutkiewicz, like Sauer-Thompson, is responding to states of envelopment. Dutkiewicz doesn’t start out to make conceptual work. Rather, he immerses himself in the design of nature ‘to drill down into the grain of it’.(7) It is an emotive pursuit in which discovery and revelation are central. By design, ‘shooting’ pictures, ‘freezing’ time or ‘capturing’ scenes have little to do with the creation of a photograph.
The work Hallet Cove (Fig 5) is as much a conversation about light as it is about its subject. We could be looking at rock, mud, ice or something else entirely. Representation as we know it to be becomes redundant in favour of deeper concerns of relationship. Present in the marks across its surface, one can perceive the edges of what could be fractal geometry that we either too close or too far away to perceive. Accepting Martin Heidegger’s account of knowledge being a material practice, and more recently, Karen Barad’s dynamic entanglement via agential realism, what is inside the frame becomes as important as what is outside.(8) Between the two is a mid-space that invites us to reflect deeper, not just of the photograph we are looking at, or the patterning of nature, but the patterning within ourselves. The relationship between photographer, subject and audience reaches beyond the temporal reduction of viewing a picture to become an experience of Country. We just have to allow it.
The premise for EARTH / ROCK / STONE was to honour South Australia’s unique geology and its curators choose work that specifically represented their ambitions. True to the history of photographic discourse, and prospectively why the majority of work on display are photographs, the curatorship is largely literal. Small notices dot the walls detailing the sedimentary history of the region with little acknowledgement the diverse materiality or practices of artists that were invited to participate. While it was joyous to observe people’s active engagement with the photograph, the context offered by the curators framing the experience fell short of cultivating an experience of place beyond the concerns of simple geology.
For decades now, the scientists and artists have been arguing the case for materiality and entanglement. We know, now more than ever, that we live in a relational world, in which humans are as embedded within nature’s expression as mushrooms are in the forest floor. (9) While the historic discourse surrounding photography (especially in Australia) pivots on the photographer, subject, object and more recently, audience, theorists such as Ariella Azoulay have successfully argued, photography is much more than a succession of captured histories.(10) They are enlivened artefacts that shape the world in which we live. They move, change meaning, and like everything else in the material universe, shape and reshape our daily experience.
While we are firmly at the point of rejecting colonial structures and its institutions, and where we can – we should, to do it effectively is to understand what those structures are, how they continue to divide us, and what might replace them. While we work that out, it is important not ignore the depths and diversity artists go within the work of art to actively subvert the conventions of colonial practices, quietly and with reverence – two things Ngarinyin Law Man and Elder, Banggal David Mowaljarlai urged all Australians to practice back in 1985 when advocating a universal approach to respecting Country.(11) True to his Ngarinyin heritage, Mowaljarlai invited non-indigenous Australia to embrace the sentience of Country in which conversations between humans and the land, within Country become one’s daily experience.
The works of Gary Sauer Thompson and Adam Dutkiewicz are a testament to such an approach. There is no prevailing hunger to make a buck or exploit their subject. Their crafted observations of a sentient world are enacted within a sense of gratitude, reverence, and respect. It is an acknowledgement of histories and evolution beyond the blip of human presence that speak to histories beyond the human that we are all a-part of.
REFERENCES
1 There is no shortage of texts on Australian colonialism that demonstrate its on going tragedy and the impasse between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia. There is however, incredible work being done that attempts to bridge the ontological divide. Three examples include Christine Black’s excellent account of Australian Indigenous Land Law, Phillippe Descola’s observations on human perspectivism, and Eduardo Kohn’s account of semiotics beyond the human. See; Black, C. F. 2011, The Land is the Source of the Law: a dialogic encounter with Indigenous jurisprudence, Routledge, Milton Park, Abingdon; Descola, P. 2014, ‘Modes of Being and Forms of Predication’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, vol. 4, (1); Kohn, E. 2015, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human, University of California Press, London.
2 The fact that Helen Ennis and Susan Best are continually quoted up to 15 years after publication demonstrate the lack of advances in the field and associated discourse. While Azoulay offers a contemporary re-evaluation of the medium, more work is required to integrate it within the practice of making photographs. I discuss the potential through the lens of relational photography in; Houghton, C. 2021, Country Photography: Practicing Ontological Multiplicity with the Work of Art, University of South Australia; Ennis, H. 2007, Photography and Australia, Reaktion Books, London, 71; Best, S. 2011 Landscape after Land Rights, after Conceptual Art: Photography and Place, Eyeline, Vol. 75, Queensland.
3 Annear’s curation reflects the impasse Ennis and Best discuss. Despite her inclusion of Michael Riley in the line-up, the selected works reinforce practices of colonialism rather than celebrating Riley’s ontological diverse notions of Country. The context of ‘landscape’ won out. This was made even more evident in the Annear’s subsequent publication, The Photograph and Australia in which all discussion on landscape was contextualised through a historical colonial framework. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australian Landscape Photography, 1970s until now, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 9-13; Annear, J., 2015, The Photograph and Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales.
4 Haraway, D. 2015, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, US, Duke University Press, 35.
5 In conversation with Gary Sauer-Thompson, 19th October 2021.
6 As a Ngarinyin Elder, Mowaljarlai’s account of a new day straddles a diverse suite of contemporary discourse on relational materiality and entanglement. Author, Hannah Rachel Bell observed that Mowaljarlai never spoke in metaphors, but always in story to relay what he saw and experienced. From an ontological perspective Mowaljarlai uses story to share factual information about the land law, cosmology and relationship. Bell, H. R. 2010, Gwion Gwion Rockart of the Kimberley, 5-6. To read Mowaljarlia’s full account, including his engagement with the sentience within Country, see; Mowaljarlai, D. & Malnic, J. 1993, Yorro, Yorro: Everything Standing Up Alive, Magabala Books, WA, 53.
7 In conversation with Adam Dutkiewicz, 19th October 2021.
8 Martin Heidegger, 1977, The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York, Garland, 6-12. Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism provides an understanding of matter as a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations rather than as a ‘property of things.’ Thus, it realigns notions of objectivity and response-ability that are account-able and entangled with/in the observer. Barad, K. 2007, Meeting the Universe Halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 132-188.
9 Overlap between the sciences and arts re: relational practices that align with Aboriginal Australian philosophies on materiality and existence are becoming increasingly common. From the point of view of photographic practice, relational photography is supported through Charles Sanders Pearce’ s anti-cartesian approach to semiotics – in which acts of semiosis are co-constitutive – existing beyond language, beyond the human and beyond the mind. See Kohn, K. 2017, ‘Thinking with Thinking Forests’ in Pierre Carbonnier, Gildas Salmon, Peter Skafish, Comparative Metaphysics: ontology after Anthropology, London, Rowman and Littlefield International, 181.
10 Azoulay constructs her argument across two books. In The Civil Contract of Photography, she argues against photography as a sovereign practice through an examination of ethics embracing civil status, invention and distribution. In her subsequent publication, Civil Imagination she examines the historic limitations of discourse and proposes an alternate political ontology that embraces the materiality of photographs and the situated context of the encounter and event of photography. Azoulay, A. 2008, The Civil Contract of Photography, NY, Zone Books, 31-136; Azoulay, A. 2012, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, NY, Verso, 1-124.
11 Mowaljarlai, D. & Malnic, J. 1993, Yorro, Yorro: Everything Standing Up Alive, Magabala Books, WA.