On Sunday, January 12th, 2020, with the closure of the Mallee Routes exhibition at the Murray Bridge Regional Gallery, the collaborative part of Photographing the Mallee finally comes to an end after 3 years. The 2019/2020 Mallee Routes exhibition is the swan song of the collaborative project; a project which in the end, became non-collaborative.

This picture is of Adam Dutkiewicz in the Jean Sims section of the Murray Bridge Regional Gallery making notes for his review of the exhibition. He kindly agreed to do this, given the current situation of a lack of independent art criticism in Adelaide, which I mentioned in this post. This brief mention of the exhibition by The Adelaide Review is a minor exception.

My previous colleagues were hostile to the theoretical writings about photographing the Mallee: their entrenched position was that they just wanted to take photos, and they implicitly held that text (art theory or academic or literary discourse about the Mallee) was largely irrelevant, on the grounds that their pictures said all that needed to be said. Theory, in the form of the conceptual foundations of their practice, does not benefit photography because aesthetics or theory has nothing to do with, or gets in the way, of taking photos.