Photography::: The King Island Project
Monday, January 2nd, 2012
The end of the year and the beginning of the new inspired me to get off my backside and put together the King Island Project website. I’ve been slowly working on the beginnings of that long-term photography project for the last year.
My Norwegian grandfather was a photographer born in 1870 and he jumped ship in Australia at 19 years of age. He was a photojournalist and portrait photographer and my particular interest is in a set of 100 glass negatives and his wooden large format camera found by a local farmer in a King Island barn several decades ago. Knowing the gem he had in his possession, being an avid photographer, the farmer donated the items to the King Island Museum where several negatives and the camera are on permanent display. Several years later, they were exhibited for a fortnight at the Launceston Museum.
The glass negatives were taken on King Island from 1900 to 1910 and are significant because the island was only opened for farming in 1880 so Kittles’ captured many historic moments (including the first car on the island).
So this is how I see the project at this point. Imagine an ball of hemp twine unwound across space and time. My grandfather holds one end and I the other. My objective is to wind that ball back upon itself over and over in successive layers. Because it’s just too easy for me to look at Kittles’ photographs and imagine that I understand their context… the meaning of photographs changes as culture and society change around them. I need to understand what it meant for Kittles and why he did what he did.
The funding issue aside (and that I will need to visit King Island over the next few years several times) it seems like the place to start is right here with me. My life and context in 2012 is as relevant to the photographic journey as discovering Kittles’ context a century ago.
To that end I have slowly begun exploring several avenues. The first is self-portraiture and I will expand this year into general portraiture. The second, and I have to confess to being less than prolific, is the introduction of analogue film photography (or slow photography) with a Zenza Bronica ETRS medium format camera. I’m too poor for a Hasselblad but if anybody wants to donate one to a project feel free to contact me.
Even better would be a large format camera and dark room equipment. And funding.
