Gary Sauer-Thompson: December 2009 Archives

I know very little about the work of Gordon Lundy, other than his association with the Point Light Gallery in Sydney. Form there I gather that his interest is black and white interpretations of the intimate Australian landscape, and that his photographic background is studying landscape photography with Paul Caponigro and fine printing with George Tice who also introduced him to the craft of platinum/palladium in 1994.

Gordon Undy, Burdekin Dam, Queensland, circa 1994-1996

Robert McFarlane says that Undy's images from Intimations, his second book, reveal a photographer moving away from the orthodoxies of classic landscape photography, as pioneered by artists such as Caponigro, Weston and Adams:

Undy's pictures have become quieter, meditative and somehow more intensely Australian. Until recently, landscape photographers in this country, with notable exceptions such as Jon Lewis and Peter Elliston, have been deterred by the "untidiness" and "density" of the Australian bush. Undy's recent photographs, such as Midday, Mungana, Queensland 2003 embrace the compressed, inconvenient nature of the Australian landscape.

I am attracted to Undy's industrial shots made whilst documenting Queensland's mining country in the mid-1990's.

Though photographic art historians consider that William Eggleston's legendary colour show at the MOMA in 1979 was groundbreaking for the acceptance of colour photography, Saul Leiter is one of the true pioneers of colour and abstract photography. He started shooting in colour in 1948.




Saul Leiter treated the use of color in his photographs of the street and his surroundings as a painter of his time (1940s) would have done,  and  he helped lay the foundations for the development of the abstract notions of a photograph in the US.

I thought that I might start a series about Australian photographers as my knowledge of Australian photography is rather limited. I've mentioned Mark Kimber here and Wolfgang Sievers here.

I am formally starting with David Helsham who runs a successful graphic design agency in The Rocks, Sydney. He is known as wattle gardner on Flickr:

Most of Helsham's work is concerned with Australia's beach culture, Sydney style and a lot of the photography is taken in and around a rock pool bay in northern Sydney called Bongin Bongin. The obvious reference in Australian photography is the beach work of Max Dupain

Miki Johnson, one of the editors of  LiveBooks  blog Resolve, recently posted an interesting open question for everyone to attempt to answer: "What do you think photobooks will look like in 10 years? Will they be digital or physical? Open-source or proprietary? Will they be read on a Kindle or an iPhone? And what aesthetic innovations will have transformed them?"

To kick off the conversation they said that they have:

contacted fellow bloggers and asked them to post about the most prescient innovations they've seen in the photobook and publishing industries. We'll add links to those blogs within this post as they go live, so over the next few days you'll be able to see the "research" for our final post developing in real time.

A list of those who have participated in this crowd sourcing has been added to the post and there is a twitter hash tag. So we have a conversation that is pertinent to altfotonet because the future of photobooks, not withstanding the continued existence of printed photobooks, will increasingly be a digital one viewed on yet  to be invented platforms.