Evolution of a sub-thesis

After a rather hectic and frustrating morning driving around our stupid campus looking for non-existent carparks (no pics for you at the ANU, sorry Martin Parr!), I had wonderful meeting with my supervisor Helen. It was a constructive and immensely helpful one for several reasons:

1. It helped me to articulate what my interests are in terms of writing about photography, in the process marrying this to my interests in looking at photography.
2. I’m not as freaked out at the idea of unearthing written documents about the Australian documentary tradition (I rather thought of this as the proverbial can-o-worms always thinking “where to begin!”). My nerves related mostly to the thought that there would be as many documents/texts etc… out there on this subject as there are about documentary photography in other Western cultures, namely America and Europe. Thankfully – though ironically disappointingly as well – documentary photography in Australia does not seem as theorised or ‘documented’ as elsewhere. I suppose this can be a good thing, in that it provides me with an interesting thesis topic which (I’d like to think) could contribute to such a conversation, if not at the very least turn me into a well read student on the subject matter.
3. I now have a reading list from which to chronologise, the emergence of documentary photographic theory in Australia (thus I begin here as opposed to there, everywhere and nowhere!)
4. I no longer feel like I have attention deficit disorder in terms of who I am photographing. For now, I’m pretty much engaging with my take on Australians and their habits and traditions that I take a fancy to.

So, we shall meet weekly for at east a month to share and discuss themes, ideas, reactions etc… to set readings. At last, I feel like I have really begun my sub-thesis! Yay for me!

And lastly, here are two more ‘bed’ pictures….. which I have started to collect, just because (one is mine, the other is by Jen Davis, a really interesting American photographer whose work I came across in a recent edition of Aperture Magazine):

Mona

Untitled No. 11, 2005 (by Jen Davis)