Most of my large format photography has consisted of isolated photos that stood on their own or were a  strand  in a broader project such as Mallee Routes. It was  significant step to  construct a project or a series, with  large format photography after the decline of modernism and  based on  the rejection of modernism's  emphasis on artistic subjectivity.   Thus  John Szarkowski's conception of photography turned the act of looking and choosing into an aesthetic gesture that prized, above all, the unique vision of the person behind the camera. Szarkowski's efforts to establish a legitimate place in the art world for photography by formally aesthetic criteria resulted in photography as an autonomous modernist art becoming  a medium of subjectivity. 

These depopulated  photographs  were conceptual in orientation, namely  '10 silos on the Mallee Highway', which   emerged  from driving along the Mallee Highway when I was   travelling  from Adelaide to Canberra  and vice versa.  The title was formulated in advance of taking the photographs, which were  constructed as black and white and  made with  an old 8x10 SuperCambo monorail that I had owned from  the 1980s. I had bought it cheap,  but had barely used  it since,  because  it needed a new bellows. 

I  acquired a new bellows  around 2011  and started photographing the silos shortly afterwards  when I was living in Adelaide.  I would camp at places like Ouyen or Murrayville so that I could wait for suitable conditions with respect to clouds and soft light.  I followed a predetermined route in my car and systematically and photographed just the silos. 

 Carina, Mallee Highway, Victoria

I had photographed around 6-7  of the silos  and,  though I exhibited some of them  in a small  exhibition, the project was never finished. I  became sidetracked by Mallee Routes and forgot about it.  I have decided to ease my way back into photography after the 2 year layoff  by  completing the project  as a photobook.

The silo project  is photography after Conceptual Art but it is  not a  photography represents a turn away from conceptual art as in the  pictorial photography (photographic tableaux) of Jeff Wall, Thomas Demand, and Andreas Gursky, namely the mainstream fine  art medium through which seeks to reinvigorate the Western tradition of picture-making through a  revitalized modernist aesthetics of the picture. This is Michael Fried's claim: this  recent art photography is a renewal or inheritance of the project of high modernist painting. He argues that this photographic art is such because it asserts its own status as art in ways that renew the anti-theatrical aims of high modernist painting.

The project  is post-conceptual not just in being after’ conceptual art in a  historical sense but post-conceptual in the more substantive sense of not merely coming after, but also nternalizing and building upon the lessons of conceptual art.The silo project  takes its bearings from two sources. Firstly, its  refers back to Ed Ruscha's book Twentysix Gasoline Stations  (1963) and vernacular photographs of everyday objects in the autoscape.  This   is structured around a journey across the US from west to east, from Los Angeles to Oklahoma and back along Route 66’. It is   notable for its seriality, erasure of the individual as photographic content, its downplaying of artistic intentionality,   the deadpan use of the camera and  its drive by snapshots. Ruscha's photobook is a complete, self-contained work (rather than documentation of other pieces), and and a  mass produced item (as opposed to unique objects or extremely limited editions).

The second  reference is to  the industrial archaeology in   Bernd and Hilla Becher's book Anonymous Sculptures. Anonyme Skulpturen: A Typology of Technical Constructions  (1970) is a series arranged according to similarity that consists of large format  photographs of the disappearing industrial buildings and structures (eg., typologies of water towers, blast furnaces, and gas tanks organised in grids)  that they  photographed in a straightforward "objective" point of view with a 5x7 Plaubel Peco monorail  view camera. What is significant  is the historical condition and German context. 

These sources are part of the anti-subjective current  in late 1960s and early 1970s art that challenged the autonomous status of high modernism in the art world. This is the  period  of Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author,” the mediums  gradually emerged from its ghettoized position within fine art,  of the Art and Language group,  Fluxus and Conceotualism.  The latter's interest is in the photograph as a kind of pictorial readymade that can be appropriated and repurposed in ways that limit authorial control.  Thus  Jeff Wall's Landscape Manual (1970) took the Conceptualist‟s agenda of deskilling photography and making it subservient to a linguistic program to its extreme. Wall inundated the photographs with dense fields of text anchoring them in such a way that that became purely denotative. The photographs are rendered as little more than bland, ambiguous descriptions, nothing more than the affectless result of the camera‟s automatic mechanism. This retreat into the automaticity of photography  was a dead end. 

Photographing these silos are not documents or illustration of industrial archaeology.  The photos  indicate a receptivity and openness to being-in-the-world of the Mallee and the historical objects within it. The silos  gather together the wheat, railway, towns, roads in this part of the Mallee region  and in doing so open up a historical world of agricultural production in Australian modernity. We become aware of  being-in-the-world in a particular way.

The photobook breaks with the idea of photography as a medium that exists only as a framed print mounted on a gallery wall. The materiality of the photobook--printing, layout, typography, and the physical pages themselves--as complete objects unto themselves, offers alternative means to understanding the ways we interact with and experience the world through photography. 

In the traditional approach to a photobook (Robert Franks, The Americans)  the page is a neutral context, a space to simply view its collection of  images that are  placed in sequence that allows for a narrative that plays playing with a sense of flow and unfolding utilizing recurring themes to create a rhythm within the book.The format emphasizes the primacy of the photograph over the text, thereby distinguishing it as “art” from photographs that appear in the popular press. The book is acknowledged as little more than a container as it is only the photographs themselves, not necessarily the book, which are the bearers of meaning.