Louis Porter, Photography, Melbourne, 2004-2010, Unknown Land
Summary
Colour photograph of a plastic cover over a car in Huntingdale. Part of the series ‘Unknown Land’.
For more than ten years I spent a considerable amount of my time photographing on the streets Melbourne, in particular its suburbs. The photographs held by the Art and Heritage Collection present an overview of this period and are taken from several bodies of work, they include photographs of: dog shows, brothels, the Royal Melbourne Show, minor car accidents, bad paint jobs, the Moomba Festival and petrol station signs. Of these series the most significant is “Unknown Land” (2004-2010), which explores the fabric of Melbourne’s suburbia and it can be considered the matrix from which many of the other series are drawn.
When in 2001 I left the UK and arrived in Melbourne, I brought with me an array of photographic conventions forged on both sides of the Atlantic. These conventions I immediately began to apply to the streets of the CBD. For some time, it could be argued that it was not Melbourne I was photographing, but another city, one in Europe or America.
As time went on, the range of my excursions expanded, and I spent increasing amounts of time wandering the outer suburbs of the city. As I did, a sense Jamais Vu began to take hold, the more I saw the less familiar everything became and by 2004 my work had embraced a sense of what might be described as the “disorientation of the real”. It is this disorientation that underpins the works held by the City of Melbourne.
In regard to methodology, I would avoid photographing during the morning or late afternoon, preferring instead the midday sun. This light I would augment with that of a powerful flash gun. Walking was an important part of the process and I would often take a train in the morning to a location two or three stops beyond my destination and walk for some hours before beginning to make photographs.
