What I wanted to explore was an approach to the  landscape that broke away from, or was at odds with,  the celebrated style of  Bill Henson's landscapes that I had seen in an exhibition in the Castlemaine Art Gallery in 2016. I figured that  flat light and the style of nineteenth century photography would be  in contrast to Henson's dreamscapes that, worked within and developed  the tradition of  the Romantic sublime in Australia. Unlike  many photographers who hold aesthetics in low esteem  Henson does not have a fear of aesthetics,  did not  think that its time is well and truely  over, nor  did he  reduce aesthetics to beauty then dismiss it wholesale.   He accepted the core of the Romantic revolution, namely the institution of art as ontological knowledge and that art is an object of philosophy.  

One way to  understand the conventional  aesthetic background in the art institution is though M. H. Abrams'  book The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953). Abrams uses  two  metaphors  to  characterize the 18th and 19th-century English literature, respectively:—the mirror as a cool, intellectual reflection of outward reality and the lamp  as an illumination shed by artists upon their inner and outer worlds. The shift of emphasis from the former to the latter he takes to be the decisive event in the Romantic theory of knowledge as it emerged around the beginning of the nineteenth century. The artwork  ceases to function as a mirror reflecting some external reality and becomes a lamp which projects its own internally generated light onto things. The underlying concept for the lamp is expression. 

This duality would situate Henson's landscapes  as developing  the Romantic  tradition  in Australia whilst  nineteenth century photographers like  Captain Samuel Sweet in Adelaide  would be  placed in the mirror tradition. This duality is deeply entrenched and its functioning  would place my photos in the mirror tradition. This didn't make sense of the way that I  approached my  large format photography, which involves  checking things out and thinking about. The question becomes:  is there a middle space  between Abrams' oppositional pair of  the mirror and the lamp? 

One possibility to deconstructing the duality  is suggested by postmodernism. This reworks  both mirror and lamp into  the labyrinth of mirrors, in which the imagination produces only endless reproductions, copies of copies of copies where there is no longer any original.  The problem here is that realism has disappeared in a labyrinth of an endless circulation images. A more fruitful possibility is to reject the mirror conception of realism in favour of a realism that  involves or presupposes  interpretation. 

The tree photos  are  an interpretation of the old eucalypt  trees surviving in  a patch of remnant bush surrounded by agricultural land on all sides. This suggested  that, in spite of the recent  revaluation of beauty in contemporary aesthetics   the aesthetic value of these pictures should be messiness (or ugliness),   rather than beauty. On this account the value of the work of art is thus not bound up  with the contemplation of form, nor with straightforward representation, but in an “imaginative engagement” with (indirectly and sensuously embodied) ideas. They are an interpretion. 

One way to understand  this is through history of Australian art. Consider  Fred Williams Landscape with a Steep Road (1959 ),   Tree loppers (1955),  the axe in Oval landscape (1965-66) or the Chopped Trees series (1965-6) which suggest the idea that Williams’s work is concerned with a wounding of the landscape. These are bleak, grim works with their  dark vision of the felled tree as a  representation of Australian nature in the ongoing  clearing of the country for agriculture started by the colonial settlers.  This is a re-seeing the Australian bush or landscape  after the sunny impressionism of the Heidelberg School,  the pastoral grandeur of Hans Heysen  or  Harold Cazneaux's  tree in the Flinders Ranges.  

So I am viewing and understanding this  landscape with a set of background presuppositions: ugliness, agriculture, remnant bush,  land clearing, aesthetics, Fred Williams's paintings  and so on. These presuppositions form a framework of understanding known as a hermeneutical circle which informs and shapes my approach to photographing the trees. This  pre-established viewpoint or perspective of the photographer is a distinctive feature of our existence  and to understand is akin to knowing one's way around or basic orientation.  

This  realism is not that of a mirror: it is one with a particular  perspective with built-in biases or pre-judgements that are grounded in a horizon of cultural meanings shaped by history, language  and tradition. These cultural meanings, which are  embodied in language, and   stand between the photographer and the tree in the landscape, shape how we view and interpret the landscape.  In my case the perspective was an anti-pastoral one within a post-colonial frame of reference.  I was interpreting this landscape in terms of its history. 

This  deconstruction of  Abrams' duality  opens up a middle ground or space between  the  mirror and lantern' a middle ground in which visual art,  no matter how aesthetic, is nevertheless organized through a conceptual framework. Within this opened up space  there is a diversity of approaches to  photographies that are organised through a conceptual framework.