2009 AAANZ Conference Abstracts - The Art Association of Australia ...

performative modes in a 1910 album of Tasmanian photographs
by New Zealand photographer, Henry Winkelmann.
5. Picturing the Invisible Subject in Landscape
Photography
Dr Sara Oscar
In the nineteenth century visual principles of the picturesque
were central to the photography of landscape and nature. The
picturesque offered photographers a way of observing and
representing nature based on visual principles external to the
photographic subject. Postmodern theorists have long argued
that such photography was resolutely positivist, and further,
instrumental in the visual ordering of social and geographical
spaces. The belief, in turn, is that positivism severed mankind
from nature in the pursuit of order and progress. Such a
pursuit represented one of the central tenets of modernism, the
separation of culture from nature.
In the aftermath of postmodernism’s criticism of modernity,
photography appears to be increasingly concerned with themes
such as invisibility, blindness, amnesia and the ineffable.
Curiously, these themes are also apparent in contemporary
landscape photography engaging with political subject matter
such as war and the climate crisis. In effect, the articulation
of a crisis of faith in modernism is two-fold. For example,
Sophie Ristelhueber’s photographs deal with the effects of
war on landscape, the body and cultural memory. Similarly,
Sophie Calle’s recent work North Pole investigates the impact
of climate change on memory, history and cultural identity by
photographing details of the arctic landscape. On a formal level,
such political subject matter is apparent in the photograph’s lack
of information, the image made up of what the photograph is
not. In criticism of contemporary photography, words such as
invisibility and disappearance are common indicators that the
idea of absence has become part of the image.
This paper will consider how the idea of absence resonates
with the nineteenth century landscape genre in photography
and examines their relevance to contemporary landscape
photographs engaging with political issues such as the climate
crisis and the war on terror.
6. My Romantic Failure
Carl Warner
This paper presents a self-assessment of my attempts to
engage with landscape photography over the past 4 years as
seen in the exhibitions Nothingtoseehear (2006), Disturbance
(2007) and Oblivion (2009). Previously my work has been
concerned with isolating surfaces within the urban environment
with the resulting images often best understood in relation to
abstract and painterly concerns. I have always thought of these
works as engaging with an urbane landscape and I was perhaps
naive to think that I could shift my attention to a non-urban
landscape, a straight forward and familiar sense of landscape,
while continuing to pursue similar issues for photography. In
shifting my photographic subject I have instead encountered
a number of problems and a range of negative responses that
remain unresolved and confounding. These include the difficulty
of overcoming the Romantic impulse in making and interpreting
landscape photography; the difficulty of negotiating the inherent
politics of representation of the landscape; and the problem of
overcoming the viewer’s expectations of and pre-dispositions to
this form of photography, quite simply, their tendency to trivialise
and overlook landscape photography.
Carl Warner has been an exhibiting photographic artist since
1988 and his work is held in numerous public collections
throughout Australia. Recent exhibitions include Oblivion
at the Kristian Pithie Gallery in Melbourne and Oblivious at
Jan Manton Art in Brisbane. A retrospective of his work and
associated publication, Sensing the Surface was undertaken by
The University of Queensland Art Museum in 2006 and included
essays by Sally Butler, Kirsty Grant, Clare Williamson and Alison
Kubler.
Sara Oscar is an artist and writer working with photography.
Sara has a PhD in Visual Arts from the Faculty of Sydney College
of the Arts at the University of Sydney.
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