I’ve also started to look through the (very much forgotten) digital archives for Tasmanian Elegies, starting from 2017. That was my last trip to Tasmania.

The long gestation period for Tasmanian Elegies came about because it had been placed on the backburner, and then forgotten, whilst I concentrated on the Mallee Routes project and then the Bowden Archives one. The websites for both projects involved extensive work, whilst writing the text for The Bowden Archives took a lot of my time and energy. The latter project is now ready to be sent to an editor. Then I began work on the Walking Adelaide project.

Images and words. Photography and philosophy? That goes against the grain in Australia’s photographic culture, which basically holds that philosophical and artistic practices are just different practices, different language games from the language games of everyday life. No significant relations between them exist.

In contrast, photography and philosophy in Tasmanian Elegies compliment one another: — photography’s sensory encounter with the everyday world and its representations of sensuous particulars say what philosophy’s abstract conceptuality overlook or cannot grasp; whilst an aesthetic philosophy interprets photography’s picturing in the context of an isolated autonomous art being expelled and excluded from everyday life in a rationalized modernity.

Both photography and philosophy are responding to the particular whirl of dissociated sensibility
in a fragmented and reified life, the hegemony of scientific reason and the destruction of nature in the age of modernism/modernity which we have inherited.