Aftermath: Bushfire Landscape Photographs
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The exhibition Aftermath presents a series of images taken by Gollings of the landscape after bushfires burnt across Victoria on and around Saturday, 7 February 2009. These fires, as many as 400 individual fires, resulted in Australia’s highest ever loss of life from a bushfire when 173 people died and 414 were injured.
The fires were mainly centred around Kinglake, Marysville, Narbethong, Strathewen and Flowerdale — towns and regions that were all but completely destroyed. Gollings did not wish to record the personal tragedies, or the destruction to homes and buildings, but to reflect on the power of nature through photographing the landscape in the aftermath of the fire, a stark and vivid landscape baring its anatomy, as we have never seen before.
Whilst formal concerns such as focus and composition for him lie at the foundation of photography, the real power of the medium lies in the frozen moment. A moment that can be cropped, manipulated, intensified, but a real moment arrested from the ever-changing dynamic of life. In terms of technical ability he is a ‘virtuoso’ who works with energy, rapidity and instinctive vision to capture the right composition. As a technical perfectionist he also appreciates that the Aftermath series reveals a ‘looseness’, which is a result of his hand–held camera vibrating slightly from the movement of the helicopter. Significantly this embeds the works with a personal signature beyond the mechanical processes.
Aftermath includes 36 works from some 1200 images that were shot by Gollings in early March 2009. As an exhibition of resonant and poetic landscape photographs, it reminds us of the power of nature, for though man is not the subject of the series, humanity and our role within the universe is ever-present.
In these works John Gollings thus presents a humanist sensibility within the formal processes of photography.
Robert Lindsay, October 2012
Curator: Aftermath: landscape photographs by John Gollings from Black Saturday
