This picture of kelp is from the archives. It was made on a walk in South Bruny Island, Tasmania. Suzanne and I were holidaying in Tasmania.
My digital photography of the coast/foreshore consisted off banal snapshots. If snapshots are seen as the opposite of modernist avant grade practice, then snapshots are also a crucial photography of our contemporary visual culture and a particular genre of photography.
I do wish that I had spent more time photographing the kelp properly, rather than just doing a snap shot on the run and never coming back to explore the subject. I didn't really think of seaweed as a photographic subject or think of photography in terms of abstractions from nature. Snapshots are what you do on holidays I guess and they can often be photographs of nothing much.
These snapshots have little place in an art history focused on originality, innovation and individualism and what is collected in private and museums collections whose art discourse is a Euro-American modernist one. Modernism has constructed the history of photography as a coherent linear narrative occupied by a canon of photographic artists and master works. Snapshots, in contrast, are about everyday life not art. They are seen by a modernist art history to be dull pictures and visually conformist.
