Right in the middle of Newtown is this huge and completely ruined building. Its been there so long and been so completely neglected for so long that the locals no longer notice it. The graceful old lines of the architecture had allowed this building to decay with style. Eventually some developer will come along and convert the site to lots of tiny apartments and all that will remain will be some funny old photos like this one. Taken with infrared film and finished off in photoshop. I love photoshop and I love infrared film. I hope that you the viewer will like to look at this small series of building photos.
an angel on the balcony gazing out at the highrise apartments. angels are all about us in the most unlikely places.
Rhana just commented that this is wicked in red. And she was right! So here it is in red.
This is the next image from my recent adventure to Antarctica via Buenos Aries. I went to photograph the light and the ice in the fabled Southern Continent. But on my way there and back I spent some time in this wonderful city of great beauty and tremendous contrasts. I was bowled over by vibrant faded beauty of this extraordinary place and will need to go back to take more photographs of this stunning Argentine city. Shot with Ilford HP5 with a very small and very battered SLR. Analouge really suits the nature of the place and the unobtrusive nature of the camera I was using allowed me to get up close and scratch away at the surface of what I was seeing. I need to post these Argentine images before I get to the extensive portfolio of Antarctican images I have coming. They are to me the precursor and epilouge to my trip to the ice and almost as compelling.
I recently completed an artist in residency in Antarctica which saw me take a range of very unusual cameras including a homemade one with me to use in the ice and the light. But I had to spend some time in Buenos Aries on my way to and from the ship that I was travelling on and I have to say that I simply feel in love with this amazing city. So I’m going to upload a few more images from this fabulous city before I move south and begin to show some of the images which you may think you are all expecting…..:) Anyway this is another b/w film image from my very lovely little Russian lomo camera. enjoy!
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been posting infrared images taken from a trip I took recently to the Antarctic Penisula. This small body of work was loosely called the ‘Taking me Home” series. In this body of work I have been trying to share how I felt to be there and what it meant to me and how I felt about finding my self there. The Infrared images and the titles of them refer in some way to a completion of a journey but it occures to me that if I don’t post the images from the point of were my fascination/obsession with this magical land of light and ice began then I can’t really expect people to really come to a point of understanding my own connectedness with the place. So I’m going to go back nine years to where it all began. In 1999 I had just completed my first masters degree in photo-media and was feeling pretty chuffed. As a reward my favourite uncle gifted me with a flight over Antarctica. Qantas do these wonderful New Years Eve luxury flights and he invited me to be his guest. Now lets be straight…. he’s not rich and neither am I. But he is a fantastic jazz muso who’s trio had the gig of providing the entertainment onboard and who all got to take a guest as part payment….. He’d done this a few years running and had taken his wife and the following year his daughter and then finally it was my turn… Woopee….. I flew cargo class with the band over Antarctica…. wonderful stuff and it was really a great adventure.. I, however had now idea how this trip was to impact on my future direction. I’ve been working with Infrared film for many years and truly love it so when I knew for sure I was going I gathered up a whole gaggle of cameras to take with me including my special infrared only SLR. This image I have posted is pretty much what I expected from my flight…. its shot around midnight high up in the sky from the window of the plane and shows the striated layers of the atmosphere and the tops of mighty mountain ranges coming up through the heavy cloud cover that was obsuring a clear view of the continent…..because of this heavy cloud the pilots of the plane kept turning and arcing around in the skys to find a good spot for us to view from….but we passengers were having a great time and the bar was open and flowing so we didn’t really think about it…. and remember this is what I imagined I shoot…. nothing more and nothing less. The next image I will post however has haunted and facinated me ever since that time and it is the peculiar and inexplicable nature of this one particular image that has led to my specific and unrelenting quest to find out what ever I can about the nature of light at the Poles…. Antarctica in particular…. it has shaped and determined my journey through life since I shot it all those years ago…I still haven’t worked it out and it still facinates me…. But that’s the next photograph and it will be the beginning of the journey back to the magical mysterious land of ice and light that tempers my very being. That journey will include a number of landscape and the light images also taken with Infrared film that I call the ‘The Neverland Collection” So bear with me this little trip will take a week or so to come to the point but today right now I’m going to start with this reasonably unremarkable image of the continent of Antarctica taken a mile up in sky at midnight on a New Years Eve nine years ago…. it’s the begin of a remarkable journey inward that I have taken and that I feel I would like share with you all…....
Ok chaps this image is a deviation from the IR images I’m trying to put up but….. not being one to back away from a challege …....:) / This was shot while flying over Antarctica one NYE a long time ago…. 1999 to be exact and its a very poor quality shot having had no love and having langished at the bottom of a very large box of similarly unloved negatives for nearly a decade but I’m not putting it up for its beauty but rather to help fill in gaps with two other IR shots I’ve recently posted. These shots Midnight over Antarctica and Zeus over Antarctica Both these IR shots are somewhat of a mystery to me…. well Zeus over Antarctica certainly is… I just can’t quite work it out. Anyway some fella’s who shan’t be named don’t think I wouldn’t know a coronal arc from my backside so here you go fella’s. This shot was taken maybe a minute before I took the IR shots and bearing in mind that I am not an expert on atmospheric phenomena but rather an artist facinated by the odd and occasionally divinely inspiring play of light that turns up in my images …. particually when I use Infrared film…..I’m going to maintain that this is a circle not a parabolic arc and its a coronal arc around the sun…. which the plane I’m in is about to fly through…. But I’ll take feedback for sure…. and sorry again about the poor state of the image…. with more time it would be sparkly but I want to get this up….... cheers chaps…...:)
Well I’ve been uploading some pretty and colourful images for the last week or so and now I’m going to post some more of my dark landscapes again. All of this series will be infrared film images taken a couple of years ago at a friends place in the Hunter Valley. Mostly they will be hills and valley shot to emphasize the skys and will be somewhat abstract for that. I find that I see patterns in nature that are revealed very early in the morning or very late at night which not suprisingly are my favorite times to shoot.
Well just for something completely different from the last lot of dark and mysterious Infrared landscapes…. this is the first of a little run of colour images from a wonderful little Holga toy camera. This image was however also taken in the same location in the Hunter Valley at the place I think of as daniland. When I go to stay there I get to sleep in the cutest most beautiful little cabin that is attached to the main studio. Out the front of this cabin is a little wooden porch that looks over a dam and across a deep and heavily wooded valley. There is a little table with some chairs there and on the table is this lovely little bonsai tree. On this particular morning there was a very heavy fog….. not unusual for this location even in the height of summer…. although it will burn off in the sun in a couple of hours after sunrise. But I just love the way the fog makes the landscape so intensely mysterious and just a tiny bit scary… great for taking photo’s even when you can hardly see the ground infront of you…...
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well its june and its wet and there are not many leaves on some of my trees and it’s making me feel a bit blue…. so here is another wintery sky in my big back yard…...
there are some stunning beaches down were I live…. and no matter the weather or the season there will always be some wet ones in the water having a surf….. if you look really closely… maybe try a larger view…. you can see a whole bunch of little black dots in the water….. surfers in wetsuits…. or shark bait as I fondly think of them…... taken with my lovely little Holga using 120 fuji reala film…....
a portrait of a young punk shot many years ago in a derelict Refern squat….....he was one of the many ‘extras’ around the punk group ‘The Real Fucking Idiots’.....this chap here was what LostGod would describe as a’”fucktard’
another pinhole photograph to go with this one and this one / This image is a composite of two paper negatives from a 5×7 inch by photo paper box. I’ve placed both negatives on to one sheet of 10×8 inch b/w paper and made a contact print and then scanned it on my flatbed in order that I could upload it here. Both of these images were hand held exposures for fifteen seconds in bright sun which is why they are so soft….... anyway enjoy coz I sure had fun making these photographs.
Another paired IR landscape for an upcoming show. possibly. I’‘ll make four pairs in all but most likely will only produce two pairs for the exhibition. The first one was this one and the second pair was this one So I’m still fooling about with the final selection and will observe and take note of what people think here…..
a nice little eternity tee shirt to go with the photo just uploaded….
sometimes I get up real early in the morning and go and watch the sun come up over the ocean…. sometimes all I get is very tired by the afternoon and sometimes I get to see the sky on fire…. shot with fujichrome 400 at around 5.30am or so one morning down on my local beach …. and this is straight from the scanner and is totally untouched by any Adobe product…the colour it is is the colour it was
one of the more serious swimmers from down my way battling it out with the elements at dawn in one of the ocean pools at my local beach….. such dedication…. it’s all I can do to stay upright and take the odd photo in the face of this turbulent yet silky silky sea…..
most mornings I get up early and walk down to the sea to bath in the extraordinary light and watch the sun come up over the Pacific Ocean….. sometimes I just watch the day come to life but sometimes I swim in the dawn light and then go home all sandy and goosebumps to drink some tea and read the newspaper….it’s my own private churchy type thing and this small series of shots from this morning are being uploaded so you can share that experience….. well this is the last one in the series…. from this point the reality of the day kicks in and I leave this picture perfect little local place and go home to start the business of the day…. but hey this is just soooo much better than morning telly….. enjoy my little walk on the beach at dawn coz I sure as hell know I do…..
the second of my small series of black and white shots from a body of work called “is there anybody there?”. the first one is called repression and you can just follow the link to look at that one….. and the last one is called redrum . / . / .
finally… this is the very last of this current rather long series of Infrared photo’s of the old Silo building in Newtown …..it’s been nice to have been able to post them here…thanks for looking / . /
as I sit high up on the edge of a cliff waiting for the moon to rise from the sea I watched all these crazy fisherpersons dodging the waves on the rock shelf over yonder. one slip and your fish supper not having fish for supper…. I guess it’s just lucky that the swell wasn’t all that big… or maybe it just looks more dangerous from where I was sitting that it really was down there on the rocks…and maybe they were looking up at me perched on the edge of the cliff thinking something similar…. life is funny sometimes / . /
just something I saw written on the pavement in Newtown… and I like it the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and all that…. / . /
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