My old incomplete thoughtfactory website (thoughtfactory.com.au) is now publicly gone. It was constructed in 2019 as a business which is no more, and the domain could not be renewed without having an up-to-date ABN. No business no ABN. So it is a fond goodbye with nostalgia to 6 years of blogging and photography. It was a learning curve to the present, which is Light Paths. The present then is after thoughtfactoy’s demise, whilst bearing its historical traces.

The historical roots of Light Paths lie in a failed attempt to help foster art photography in South Australia that failed to get off the ground, due to lack of support or interest. Light Paths, as the replacement of thoughtfactory.com.au, is centred within contemporary photography in what Arthur Danto has called the post-historical era. It continues to look back on what photography has been whilst looking forward to possibilities of what photography becomes in a digital networked future. Being historical entails that we cannot look above or beyond that which has been done in the history of art.

Danto’s category of the post-historic era is a complex concept that combines three different senses: 1) the ‘end of art’ in the Hegelian sense: the overcoming of art by philosophy; 2) the ‘end of art’ in the historiographical sense: as the end to the grand narratives (realist and modernist) of the history of art; and 3) the ‘end of art’ as the beginning of a new period in history.