This is another image from the Mantung photoshoot in the South Australian Mallee in the early 1990s. It was made with a Cambo 5×7 monorail and  Kodak black and white  Tri-X film. This is  another archival image that didn’t make it into the   opening exhibition of the Mallee Routes project at the Atkins Photo Lab in Adelaide. There were  no archival images amongst my 5 images  in that exhibition.

The image  was made after  the postmodernism  opposition to the US modernist formalism,  most often identified with John Szarkowski and the art photography favored by the Museum of Modern Art in New York,  had emerged in Australia; a postmodern opposition that helped to establish photo discourse in Australia.  Szarkowski had proposed in The Photographer’s Eye (196) that ” it should be possible to consider the history of the medium in terms of photographers’ progressive awareness of characteristics and problems that have seemed inherent in the medium.” In other words, Szarkowski  claimed to be seeking the essence of photography, in his case by privileging the specific qualities of the photographic medium.

Photography’s own success in becoming institutionalised  has seen it manage to eclipse “the very notion of a medium”.