John Boyd Macdonald
John Boyd Macdonald
The area around Mt Jagungal is now a designated wilderness zone within the larger Kosciuszko National Park. According to the Environmental Defender’s Office, “Wilderness areas are usually large, remote and undisturbed areas, generally unchanged by…
In this rural landscape (photographed just to the east of Dalgety, near the Black Range Road junction) I wanted to give equal space to two quite different relationships to the Monaro landscape: that of the…
A whimsy. We talk of photographs as being ‘taken’ or ‘captured’ by the camera. With this image I wanted to take the analogy a little further, imagining the captured images as wild creatures, trapped in…
This image depicts a section of road between Dalgety and Jindabyne in the Monaro region of NSW. Prior to the arrival of the first European colonists in the 1820s this region was Ngarigo country. They…
The base photograph for this image was recorded along the now-overgrown Farm Ridge Fire Trail, at the top of a climb up from the Tumut River and several kilometres north of the ruins of the…
The place names of the Snowy Mountains region have always seemed very special. For me at least, they have a romantic, even magical resonance in their sounds and the feelings that they evoke. Names like…
The inclusion of text with this panoramic Monaro landscape image (along the Jindabyne-Dalgety road) fundamentally alters the image. From being simply a view of a specific rural landscape with a fence, a stark bare tree…
This image has much in common with the previous Willy Gray picture. The base image was taken at the same time and location (mid-winter 2012 near Dalgety in the Monaro region of NSW). It’s a…
The text incorporated in this Monaro landscape image (three original photographs taken near Dalgety) is from The Monaro – a poem by David Campbell (reproduced in his Collected Poems). The full verse is: “Willy Gray…
I’ve been reading a little about the functions and mechanisms by which ‘signs’ (in the broadest sense of the word) operate. Icon, index and symbol, and the often impenetrable language of the semioticians. But some…
During our recent travels in Western Australia there was a heap of great and varied photographic opportunities. (I hope to write a post about some more of them soon …) But one of the real…
I had a great trip recently, snowshoeing from Crackenback (above Thredbo) to Mt Townsend. It was mid-week (no-one else out there), there had been about 20cm of fresh snow the night before (creamy smooth snow…
PhotoAccess is currently showing an exhibition of work by no less than 32 photographers. It’s called Winter Postcards, and as the name suggests all of the works must be postcard size (i.e. 6″ x 4″),…
This post contains some thoughts on the incorporation of text in still photography, and was written as notes for my Private Thoughts in Public Places project. Text and images have been combined in art since…
This post contains some thoughts on the depiction of ‘narrative’ in still photography, and was written as notes for my Private Thoughts in Public Places project. Photographers have sought to portray narrative in their work…
Private Thoughts in Public Places is a short (12 minute) video slideshow (with voices, music and subtitle text) which I prepared as a studio practice project for my studies at the ANU School or Art.…