Stavros Pippos’ Flinders Ranges landscape photography
Stavros Pippos has a background in television production and, though he has produced 6 photo books about South Australia, he has a minimal internet presence — no website, limited reviews of exhibitions and books, and the odd interview. The odd photo is online. So we just have his photo books.
Two of his early photobooks in the 1990s explored the South Australian landscape of the Flinders Ranges through colour photography. The first was An Australian Landscape The Flinders Ranges: The Art of the Photographer (1993) made with medium format cameras of the southern and central Flinders whilst the second, Flinders Ranges South Australia (1996), incorporated the northern Flinders (the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges) with the photos being made with a 5×4 Linhof. Both books have a similar format: an introduction by Hans Minchim, a page of text by Pippos opposite a photo, an epilogue and technical notes. They can be regarded as companion books.
As art history informs us new art is art in part because of its relation to past art and so there is a backward connectedness between the art of the present and that of the past that allows for an art-historical understanding of art. Hans Minchim in his introduction to the 1993 An Australian Landscape The Flinders Ranges refers to Edward John Eyre’s colonial exploration of the Flinders Ranges of the 1840s, the subsequent pastoral settlement, refers to the landscape photography of the 1870s (no names are mentioned), references the landscapes of Harold Cazneaux of the 1950s, and 3 films: early black and white film — Bitter Spring (1949)– and the two colour films Kangaroo (1951) and Robbery Under Arms (1956). Minchim’s long introduction in the second book, Flinders Ranges South Australia (1996), is about the significance of the pre-Cambrian fossils in the Ediacara Range near the old Beltana township.
What is the connectedness between the art of the present and that of the past in these books? They do have a minimal relation to the historical visual representations of the Flinders Ranges. There is no mention, for instance, of E.C. Frome, S.T. Gill, Henry Tilbrook’s 1894 Elder Range panorama, E.L Walpole, or Frederick Joyner. There are a few passing references to this being Hans Heysen country but not to the visual forms of their images. There is a sense of isolation from the adapted and modified inherited Eurocentrc visual and cultural tradition in the second half of the 20th century (e., Conrad Martens and John Glover) as well as a sense that the photographic approach is akin to the picturesque tour in Great Britain– the Wye Valley, North Wales, the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands — of the 18th century. What appears in the books are a series picturesque scenes of the Flinders Ranges (Minchim mentions the “aesthetically appealing landscapes”) that might be encountered by the traveler — increasingly the tourist — passing through the landscape. Pastoral ruins are quintessentially picturesque.
There is a complicated intertwining of nature with culture since the picturesque emphasised the local and familiar had associations with marine painting and watercolour painting, owed much to the topographical movement and rising interest in science and natural history and eventually developed distinct verbal and pictorial terminology. critically exploring the tradition of photographing the landscape or commenting on the political and social issues arising from our traditional relation to the land.
The book is organized around the regional landscape from Arkaba to Blinman. Pippos’ picturesque approach to viewing this landscape links back to how Heysen painted it — its distinctive colours, ridges and gorges define the ranges — with Pippos including photographs of the ruins of colonial pastoral settlement in sun-drenched light along with the occasional portraits of people living on the land. The photographic emphasis is on the beauty of the landscape as place, and this combined with the picturesque, situates this landscape photography outside the concerns of the art world in the mid-to late 20th century.
Modernist art had behaved differently to art from earlier period since an entire language of form suddenly feel into disuse, was replaced by a new language of different components and an unfamiliar grammar with the inherited repertory of forms no longer corresponding to the actual meaning of existence. Modernism was premised on repudiating the conventions of pre-existing art but even an artwork that consciously denies, disavows, or repudiates its predecessors cannot escape their influence as it is not independent of the past.
Is there then a struggle between the competing demands of originality and convention, between the new and the traditional within the picturesque in these photos of the southern and central Flinders Ranges made in a historical context of the 1980s? Place, realism and tradition are working together to establish a regional identity based on the Flinders Ranges in a globalized world, and doing so without being nationalistic.