Light Paths replaces the thoughtfactory.com.au website that was Gary’s personal website from 2019-early 2025. That has gone forever. It’s Light Paths replacement can be understood as a hub in an informal network or constellation of art photography websites and blogs based around multiple ongoing projects.
The major project websites are:
The Bowden Archives and Industrial Modernity Mallee Routes: Photographing the Mallee
The two minor project websites are:
The Long Road to the North Nourishing Terrains
There is a presence on social media, primarily Flickr, Facebook and Instagram. The various blogs (eg., Leica Poetics, The Littoral Zone or Rhizomes) are notebooks used to help work things out.
This loose, fragmentary network pools, or brings together, the individual websites/blogs into a digital space (or Khôra). The receptacle-like properties of the khôra (χώρας) as a digital space help to nurture, sustain and develop a culture of contemporary art photography in Australia. The form this takes is photographic conversations.
Photography has changed dramatically since the period of the late twentieth century that had been provisionally mapped by Adelaide Art Photographers-1970 2000, primarily due to the emergence of digital technology and centralized social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter Instagram) around 2010 displaced the blogosphere and transformed how photography was publicly presented. Associated with, and Informing the diverse current practices of photography, was a growing cultural shift towards a conception of the Internet as a platform for sharing and collaboration.
The emergence of the photo-sharing platforms (eg., Flickr) meant that the photographs of millions of individuals are now contained within online databases connected to each other by hyperlink, tag, or search term; streams of visual data dissociated from their origins and only by semantic tags and placed in a pool with other images that share similar metadata.
Twitter now is dying, the collegial conversations of Flickr are long gone, Facebook has lost its cultural vitality and there is an exodus of photographers from Instagram since it lost the sizzle and the vibe. Despite the emergence of platforms such as Bluesky, TikTok and Substack there is no visual culture town square — it’s a fragmented internet now.
The photographic present is digital, the digital image has become a networked image, and contemporary photographic practices have shifted from primarily being print‐oriented in a gallery to a transmission‐oriented, screen‐based experience. The photographic image now occupies the same space as the video game, the film trailer, the newspaper and the artwork in a virtual museum. It becomes part of an endless stream of data. In giving up the historical attributes of a photograph as a unique, singular and intentional presence, the networked snapshot is becoming difficult to comprehend with the traditional conceptual tools of visual literacy and photographic theory. Nowadays serious art criticism combined with art history (eg., the recent works by T.J. Clark and Michael Fried) about contemporary art is, for the most part, little more than failed hopes.
Light Paths is an attempt to bring some dialogue to this flux of data, whilst reconnecting contemporary art photography with our everyday lives and creativity in the form of conceptual projects. These pictures are a counter to the online networks that strip individual photo of the historical context of the photographic object as it becomes absorbed into multiple flows of visual data that are structured by algorithms and AI. This means that art’s authority and critical function continues to remain a problem within contemporary culture.
T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1999; Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008.