Photography and text by John Gollings
The photographer John Gollings, who took many of the pictures in this issue, grew up in Melbourne, where he started taking photos as a child with a folding Ensign camera. During family holidays camping in national parks, he became intrigued by the idea of solely surviving off the land – an alien skill for a modern urban dweller. Gollings went on to study architecture at Melbourne University. In the 1980s he began using aerial photography to document the changes in the Australian landscape after bushfires devastated the vegetation and found it an ideal method for capturing the essence of the landscapes of his homeland.
“Australia is vast, empty and relatively flat. It is also hot and difficult to survive without the knowledge of the aboriginal people about water supplies, food sources and walking tracks. These are expressed in aboriginal art as symbolic aerial maps, which encompass spiritual beings and mythologies as well.
The complex patterns and meaning of this art have had a profound effect on my aerial photography. The viewer’s eye moves differently over a two-dimensional aerial image, exploring detail, pattern and meaning without the emotional overlays of beauty, composition or art theory that are part of appreciating European art.”
“My attraction to sites such as the open cut mines and the aftermath of the McClelland bush fires is the idea of fundamental change, whether wrought by nature or humans, that offers a new vision of the world – economic, environmental, or cultural.
The Australian vegetation needs to be burned and renewed regularly to perpetuate the ecosystem. I’m interested in the way the underlying topology of the land becomes visible after these fires. Fire has tragic effects on humans, but a profound and necessary effect on the landscape.”
“The air is clean and dry, so sun penetration is high, as is the contrast with shadows. With a low, warm sun angle at dawn and dusk, the colours are spectacular and pure. With increasing pollution, east-coast cities now have developed a softer light, as the rays are dispersed through haze, but photographing in Australia can still be difficult if you are used to the northern hemisphere.
I have intensified the colours a little with contrast and saturation, but my photos express the extraordinary range of chemical elements left buried in the desert by people. The irony is that these human-made piles of rubbish exactly mimic the aboriginal dot paintings of the western desert.”
Born 1944, Melbourne Australia, John Gollings is a photographer specialising in the built environment including the documentation of both ancient and modern cities around the world. He operates from a collaborative design, photography and 3D rendering studio in Melbourne, Australia and works extensively in Asia, especially in India, Cambodia, China, Libya and New Guinea.
He was the co-creative director 2010-12 of the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Architectural Biennale and in 2014 he launched a documentation of every high-rise on the Gold Coast, which Gollings achieved by walking from Paradise Point to Coolangatta, taking one image of every high-rise building along the way.
“The central landscape metaphor in Australian architecture represents the exploration and colonisation of the land. It also contains a lot of social and political comment on our treatment of the first peoples using symbolic architectural elements to express massacre and mythology.” p
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