Birdshit rock series, Lake Illawarra

In Susan Sontag’s collection of essays, On Photography (1977), the American street photographer, Garry Winogrand, is quoted:

I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed

While far from street photography, the initial act of photographing ‘something’ is evidently clear - bird rock squarely framed in the foreground surrounded by a gradually out-of-focus Lake Illawarra and horizon line. The mindset of ‘…to find out what something will look like…’ is also as easily applied to every act before and after the photographic moment. The image is taken through a series of questions and choices from thoughts of subject and place through to the formal qualities of art making.

Bird rock, with its alternative title ‘birdshit rock,’ is still an ongoing question and series of screenprints and paintings. Individual titles include ‘A work in the past,’ ‘bubblegum green,’ and simply ‘Lake Illawarra.’

This work was created on Dharawal and Gadigal land and exhibited in December 2024 as part of the Summer Arts Festival, Project Contemporary Artspace.