The Marks of Man

The problem with landscape photography, in my case anyway, is the notion, that pretty much anybody who buys a camera and is a bit tired of photographing their relatives, their friends, Glamor?? or any other subjects, which when we face up to it are the real reasons why we have cameras. Down the list comes landscape, Sontag said it was a way of proving you were there. I'm quite insecure about the process of making a landscape. You would have thought, that with the number of people who make landscapes, for example at www.photo.net that somehow there is a living to be made from these beautiful interpretations of the landscape from around the world. What is it that makes us want to climb hills and photograph the sunset. I have my personal answer to that, I'm not sure if it's about photography. It's about my freedom, in a world where even though we live in a democratic country, freedom is a myth. So I try to find my freedoms within my photography. Other people find their fre...

New Zealand and photography are strange bed fellows. The history of this remote country is about survival and making do. New Zealand went through a period of unusual home made left wing politics, that made it hard to import any item not made in part, in country. That led to the Kiwi make do attitude, which of course is the same in many countries around the world. The man in the shed making do, is reflected in Britain and other places. Unfortunately the idea has gone a bit far here in New Zealand. In my exhibition I had a perfectly reasonable and intelligent man who came in a few times to view a picture. He then went to the same location to recreated the photograph. Yep lots do that, but to do it repeatedly and still wonder why the result is not the same as mine, surly would lead a person to ponder, that it takes more then a location and camera to make a good photograph. What I think is missing is the realization that education and immersion into the context, both culturally and histori...

I missed the light today, I was on the wrong side of the Port Hills. I stopped at the sign of the Kiwi and did a quick run up Sugar loaf. After much flapping around and negotiating joggers, I managed to get one image. I took three images, one at 16 minuets exposure, the clouds looked amazing with scanner distortion. I got a contorted jogger in another, the first image was best. Bringing a book helped me wait for the image to scan. I love the distortion in the grass. Here is a close up of the grass before I have removed the colour shift . You can see the 3 colour split from the (Sony?) tri linear array, and have a taste of the resolution. Thanks for the tips on software and Macs.

I don’t believe technology has really changed photography; other then to open it up creatively even further. It has shown us we have to be ambivalent about how and why an image has been created. This ambivalence and discarding helps us question some of the myths that we surround ourself concerning photography, the myth of the blur, the myth of time, the myth of capture area, the myth of the document the myth of the photographic rather then human perception. Rather the capture of time through representation and memory by the vehicle of a camera has been strengthened, because we have so many ways of capturing images and holding them with out relying on human memory. When I use the camera I am looking for so many things beyond what my eyes or camera tell me is there. The ghosts of people on a footpath, the change of the vegetation of hundreds of years, the memories of human loss and gain. I try to see the conflicts on the land both human and natural, the difficulty is expressing this all ...