This  picture of roadside vegetation was made in late January whilst I was on an early morning  poodlewalk along Depledge Road in Waitpinga  with Kayla:

I've  started thinking about the possibilities of making a video showing the  early morning light starting to move across the trunk of the  trees whilst  I have been making these kind of photos of roadside vegetation.  Photographing  along Depledge Rd and in the adjacent bushland  has made me very aware that light is constantly moving.     

 In so  thinking  I have assumed  that  video is an extension of still photography. Video represents movement -- eg., light and wind -- that is beyond the capabilities of still photography.  So video is supplementary to  still photography,  rather than being quite different in its approach to the photography that I've been  doing on poodlewalks. 

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This picture was made in mid-October whilst I was  on an early morning poodlewalk.  

I was  with Kayla and we had been walking along Baum Rd in Waitpinga since sunrise.  Kayla was on high alert for hares and kangaroos. A fox in the distance  quickly disappeared. We were returning along Baum Rd to the Forester when the photo was made.

In the  few weeks since this photo  the green  undergrowth has turned  yellow/brown.  It is the same with  the fields in the background.  The landscape has  been transformed. It is now a yellow/brown landscape. This is the summer look,  and it lasts until the rains in late autumn. 

This picture of roadside vegetation along Depledge Rd in Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula is from the archives--around  2011 and made in the late afternoon whilst on a poodlewalk.  Since then  I have continued walking the back country roads and photographing  the roadside vegetation. 

Whilst doing so I  become slowly aware that the roadside vegetation in this region is slowly becoming less healthy.  When trees die, are strangled by box mistletoe infestation, or fall over in a storm they  are quickly chopped down for firewood. There is very little natural re-growth taking place within  the roadside vegetation  between the agricultural paddocks.  The  thinning tree canopy is noticeable,  as is the overall poor condition of the pink gums in this rural part of  the Mt Lofty Ranges.  

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Though it is well known that the early conceptual artists used photography in ways that went far beyond its modernist definitions as a medium – and succeeded thereby in breaking down the boundaries of all mediums in modernist art--- there is still an  absence in art history discourse that evaluates the  known conceptual photography in Australia. What liitle writing there is--eg., Anne Marsh in Look: Contemporary Australian Photography since 1980--suggests that it is a turn to  the dumb aesthetic of amateur images and  street photography  to undermine a modernist aesthetic. 

To gain an understanding  on conceptual art and photography (photoconceptual activity) we can turn back to America in 1962, where  the California painter Ed Ruscha used the principle of statement and performance  to create the book Twentysix Gasoline Stations. According to the art historians Ruscha first came up with the title, then proceeded to photograph the subject on one of his road trips from Oklahoma City (his hometown) to Los Angeles, his adopted city.

The work of art was to be the book itself, simply but carefully designed, whereas the photographs inside showed no traces of aesthetic decision making at all, as if the artist had merely pointed the camera out the car window in order to fulfill the requirements of the textual phrase.

Ruscha's book was  inextricably tied to its status as an article in a mass-produced and circulated publication. This idea of attaching the work of art directly to the channels of distribution and publicity that constituted its inevitable fate as a commodity transgressed the presentation of the single photography on the white walls of the art gallery. 

Ruscha produced sixteen books from the early 1960s to th late 1970s and some the  books in this instructional and perfomative  mode based around repetition  included Thirty Four Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967)  and Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968). The conceptual basis of these works---following a rule or instruction in the spirit of experimentation-- is an alternative to the  anti-aesthetic interpretation  that is based on  the mimicing of non-autonomous photography, such as amateur snapshots or  photojournalism.

It  enables us to  link Ruscha's work back to the radical impulse in the European avant garde, that had been excluded by the Greenbergian canon;  and to see it  as a pathway that reconfigures photography away from the ontology of  high formalist modernism, which was secured by  the medium specific characteristics as outlined by Clement Greenberg, John Szarkowski and Michael Fried.   

This formalist modernism insisted on a division between high and low art, made a distinction between the popular vernacular and the avant-garde and highlighted the differences between a radical  avant-garde and the conservative fine art tradition.  It is what is currently defended by cultural conservatives in order to defuse the critical edge of art. 

On a strict art historical reading, the expression ‘conceptual art’ refers to the artistic movement that reached its pinnacle between 1966 and 1972 ] Amongst its most famous adherents at its early stage we find artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Robert Morris, Joseph Beuys,  Mel Ramsden and Ian Burns in Australia.

Whilst conceptual art on this interpretation  might arguably be limited to works produced during these five or six years nearly half a century ago, it seems overly narrow – certainly from a philosophical perspective – to limit our inquiry to works produced during that period alone. The reason is that  conceptual art, historically speaking,  sets out to question  our traditional conceptions of what an art object should be made of and what it should look like. The artwork is a process rather than a material thing or object.

Australian photographic art historians –eg., Helen Ennis and Gael Newton— make little or no reference to conceptual art, and its core idea that the locus of the work was deemed to be the idea or statement with the work being a performance of that statement. Do we infer that, unlike the US and elsewhere,  there was no conceptual photography produced by art photographers in the late 20th century?

There were. I can recall  Robert Ronney's Holden Park 1+2 (1970); Virginia Coventry's Service Road (1976-77); Ian North's Canberra Suite (1980-81). There may well be others.This photography was lo fi and it  was used to destablize the formalist aesthetic that was hegemonic in the  art galleries, such as the Australian Centre for Photography and the Australian National Gallery. 

A  example of a statement  or idea is ‘Walk down a country road on the Fleurieu Peninsula and take twenty  photographs of a tree (a pink gum or wattle)  and a Xanthorrhoea’. The process is walking down the country road,  and it is contrasted to the modernist idea of  photography as a  separate and definable “medium” distinct from painting, sculpture, printmaking etc. 

On this interpretation of conceptual art,  process matters more than physical material, and because art should be about intellectual inquiry and reflection rather than beauty or  aesthetic pleasure, the work of art is said to be the idea at the heart of the piece in question. The inference is that there is a critical edge to conceptual art towards the art tradition and institution.

Hence the idea of an oppositional photography that establishes a critical distance from cultural conservatism; a cultural conservatism that has traditionally defined how we look at, and understand,  the Australian  landscape.