s2z Photography Blog

Street Art?

I listened to this ABC broadcast about Street and and Graffiti. this morning

“Street artists, advertising agencies and the authorities are in the middle of a space race.

It’s a lot less about little green men and much more about spray paint and stencils. But the stakes are still sky high. Artists are busy commandeering as many city surfaces as their paints will allow, authorities are trying to neutralise the threat, while advertising agencies are keen to clone the potency of hand painted art.”

I have a small series of work that looks at much more ephemeral art of peeling advertising posters. Which is a kind of street art.

Creativity in the time of a Pandemic?

Bore Beach San Remo, Victoria, 2020-03-29 14:00:03

I made the picture above on the Sunday before stage 2 restrictions were brought into effect. We had taken a Sunday drive to explore real estate.

Autumn in Melbourne is usually a prolific time for me. The light is beginning to change for the better. I have a two week break from my job, and with a reliable steady income it is easy to be spontaneous and often drive somewhere for the sake of it.

Not so this year.

Despite this lack of movement on my part there have been many, many, emails from all kinds of cultural organisations with ideas for keeping creatively busy. There has been funding support and peer support across every level of the industry. Of course this could only happen because of the internet. This is a wonderful thing. I have submitted a project to HAFNY’s online callout “walking” as a consequence. Not to mention the Ballarat International Foto Biennale is partnering with FORMAT International Photography Festival and Gallery of Photography Ireland to create a visual record of the COVID-19 crisis on Instagram. [Use the tags, #massisolation and #massisolationAUS].

Still; I hanker to go outside follow my intuition while driving with a car load of equipment or walking with some equipment.

I guess I will hibernate in my darkroom.

Throwback Thursday [The Pandemic Edition]

sunset over sunshine — The silos at the end of our street, 4th of April 2019 at 18:53:38

For the record

As this is a new blog I’m putting a list of some of my online projects here. I use flickr and tumblr as my two main digital folio display tools.

Screen Shot 2020 04 05 at 18 02 14

First tumblr:-

Every Saturday at 17:17 I make a picture, it’s a project about time and photography’s unique ability to preserve it.
Four days a week at work I make this picture, again it’s a project about time and photography’s unique ability to preserve it.
I have lived in Sunshine now since 2000. At some point around 2017 I realised that I was sitting on a vast archive of images. These were of things and scenes that have changed or disappeared. I decided then to start looking at other parts and places of Sunshine and record them. This is an ongoing project like the other two predominantly digital but I do use film as well.

Flickr: Screen Shot 2020 04 05 at 17 59 54 –

I have many ideas and projects that tick away on flickr, this list details some them.

Psychogeography, this project has its roots in my use of phone cameras, the underlying concept comes from an art movement active in the late 1960s early 1970s. The movement was called the Situationists and extolled the idea that walking and observing in the city was an act of creation and rebellion itself.
C roads & other adventures this project is like the Psychogeography however it involves me driving in a manner that is spontaneous and intuitive. It too is an going project.
Doors/Doorways Inspired by Egene Atget’s work I find that the shape and form of a door is very interesting.
Concrete as canvas as a surface most people look at concrete as a bland and uninteresting surface/object. Under the right conditions though the surface can become quite beautiful.
Abstractions. This work is about the how surfaces can becomes an abstration unto themselves. What really makes these pictures interesting for me is the fact that they are also ephemeral and disappear very quickly.

Online Exhibition Opportunities?

A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.” – Rebecca Solnit, from Wanderlust: A History of Walking.

There is something therapeutic about going on walks and taking pictures – sometimes aimless, sometimes with calculated, project-based parameters in mind. It’s a road trip on foot. It’s about pause, introspection, mindfulness, and maybe some visual mile-marking.

In today’s socially distant, quarantined world, walking (safely!) can be a form of personal liberation – one of the few things we can do outside.

For Humble’s next online exhibition, we’d like to see your images related to walking.
Interpret this however you like. This will be co-curated by Bryan Formhals and Humble’s co-founder Jon Feinstein.

See HAFNY for more info:-

I hope to put together an application soon.

Sunset over Melbourne

What impact does a visual trope like a sunset have in this day and age of the networked image. Especially if it was made before flickr, facebook and probably google? This sunset was made circa 2002. It was made from the edge of the site where I worked from 1994 to 2013.

I’m thinking of posting sunsets fairly frequently as a kind of response to the current pandemic sweeping the world.