I remember that photographing this rock formation at Kings Head, Waitpinga with a large format camera (5x4) was a disconcerting experience. It was probably 6 years ago, just after we had shifted to living on the coast of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula  in South Australia, and I was photographing in my local area.   

It started me thinking about the landscape tradition. Though I'd studied this rock formation a number of times before deciding to photograph it, the photographic act  was not as simple as pointing the camera at an object in front of the camera  and taking a photo. There was  the  time and effort involved in carrying the equipment to the location, then the time and effort making the photo. The latter was over an hour as I waited for the sun to go off the rock. Slowly I became aware of being in nature rather than outside it. In the time that it took to make the photo I  became aware of  nature changing around me,  as well as noticing the weathering marks on the rocks.   

Slowly  the large format photographic event   became about the experience of being in nature: that is becoming aware of the  wind, sea spray, the sounds of the waves and the gulls, the heat reflected from the rocks onto  the human body, the clouds covering and uncovering the sun, and the ever changing light;  rather than being the photographer  standing as an outside observer gazing upon the  form of the coastal rock formation. 

So what to make of this embodied experience  of large format photographing? What did it mean in terms of the history of  the landscape tradition in Australia? Did it mean anything, given that this was, and is,  the traditional land of the Ngarrindjeri people? This is where the sealers and whalers stationed on Kangaroo Island  prior to 1836 grabbed and made off with the women from the Ngarrindgeri people. 

What would it be like to photograph this country  from the perspective of the Ngarrindgeri people after land rights I wondered?  

Should this kind of  questioning experience  at Kings Head change the way I  photographed this coastal non-urban  nature? Do I move in closer to the rock formation  to show its weathered  history?  Do I go  more abstract? Do I figure out ways to photograph that are part of the above immersive/embodied  experience?  If so, how would I do this?   How would I photograph the heritage of the violent pre-colonial encounters around Encounter Bay and Kangaroo Island?  How would this square with the presence of the nonhuman world?

Picturing the land suddenly became more complex. The straight forward depiction of the land  was of no interest to the art world.   I realized that I needed to do some  practice-based research outside the university.   The research question is: in what ways can a postcolonial and/or ecological  "gaze" be evoked or explored through large format photography?  

I had a vague idea that the  aesthetic tradition (eg., Adorno in Aesthetic Theory)  talks in terms of natural beauty connecting the subject and the object closely.   Aesthetic Theory places the emphasis on this relationship with the object primary, not the subject. So the subject no longer controls the object.  That made sense as I was interested in the rock formation itself, not my subjective projection or my  subjectivity (feelings etc).    

But natural beauty  was dismissed as having nothing to do with an art world that had gone conceptual a couple of decades earlier. And yet the relationship between humans and nature (the former exploiting the latter to achieve human mastery over the nonhuman world)  was fundamental to understanding  Australia's history,  and it had led to the tragedy of an ecological crisis. So the subject/object relationship  was key to an ecology of place and non-human presence.   

Apart from realizing  that the rock formation is within a particular  place -- the southern Fleurieu Peninsula -- and so it would be different to rock formations in the northern parts of South Australia, that was far as I got.  Working through  the implications  of being in nature for landscape photography was just too hard.  I didn't even know that much of the history of  the landscape tradition in Australian art photography.  All I knew was that  it was a minor genre in art photography,   but historically central to  tourism.  

I gave up thinking about it and went and took more photos.