Geography of Attention — Portrait of Gippsland

Over recent months I have developed The Geography of Attention, a major portrait project exploring the relationship between people and places across Gippsland. Diksha is the field enquiry that prepares its ground.

Rather than treating landscape as a backdrop, Diksha approaches it as the first participant. Through walking, photography, short moving-image works and reflective writing, I will spend time across Gippsland observing weather, light, seasonal change, silence and traces of human presence. This sustained attention will help shape the locations, participants and visual language of the larger portrait project.

Diksha means initiation. My own initiation began in 1998. This project returns to that practice — not as a beginning, but as an act of homage. Before entering into a new body of work, I believe the landscape deserves to be acknowledged through time, walking and sustained attention. In that sense, Diksha becomes a contemporary Bhoomi Pooja: not a ritual of ownership, but a quiet gesture of respect before making images. The photographs do not isolate subjects; they reveal relationships between landscape, memory and lived experience.

Presentation & timing

Diksha's first portraits of landscape will be shown publicly on 11 December in Mirboo North, alongside a screening of The Quiet Weather and William Bridges' exhibited work. This gives the project a clear point at which the work must exist as a coherent body rather than as separate pieces in progress.

Galleries & community

The project is developing through conversations with galleries and arts organisations across Gippsland, including a meeting at Coal Creek Art Space. I will visit local galleries and arts spaces in places including Meeniyan and Toora, and across Baw Baw and Bass Coast, reconnecting with the region's creative communities. Diksha has independent artistic merit as a stand-alone body of work and does not depend on any single venue or individual.

Making the work

The work is made through a focused period of fieldwork across Gippsland, using photography, short moving-image studies, writing and field notes, built through sustained observation and responding to weather, light, atmosphere and seasonal change. I bring extensive experience across photography, feature films, documentary, writing and place-based projects, with the practical capacity to carry the fieldwork, production, editing and exhibition through to completion.

Binu Bhaskar is an experienced interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, documentary, feature film and literature. His recent documentary, The Quiet Weather: William Bridges and the Art of Listening, developed with support from Regional Arts Victoria, demonstrates both his ability to realise ambitious place-based projects and his longstanding engagement with Gippsland's artistic community.

Gippsland Art Gallery supports this application and would welcome the opportunity to continue discussions with Binu Bhaskar regarding the future presentation of the completed project.

Binu Bhaskar's project proposes to document the long relationships between people and place through portrait photography, moving image and writing, focusing on people whose lives have been shaped by South Gippsland and the wider Gippsland region.

The project strongly aligns with the Council's Arts, Culture & Creative Industries Strategy 2022–2026.

By bringing together practitioners from across Gippsland — artists, farmers, fishers, makers, historians and community custodians — it offers a distinctive and meaningful portrait of the region.

As I was the Cowwarr Art Space Gallery Owner/Director for nearly 30 years, and have exhibited Binu's stunning photographs previously, I believe the project's emphasis on sustained engagement with people and place aligns strongly with both my values and those of Regional Arts.

LOOKING FOR TRUE NORTH
Binu Bhaskar: Photographs
Ranjit Hoskote

“Certainly art no longer looks to nature in order to produce it anew. Nature no longer provides the exemplary model for art to follow. And yet even though it follows its own path, the work of art does come to resemble nature: there is something regular and binding about the self-contained picture that grows out from within. We might think of the crystal here. The pure regularity of its geometrical structure is entirely natural, and yet surrounded by a wealth of shapeless chaos, we encounter it as something rare, adamantine, brilliant. … It requires no empathy with the psychological state of the artist. … It is a pledge of order.”

– Hans-Georg Gadamer: ‘The speechless image’ (1965) [1]

The contemporary artist has none of the certitudes of his predecessors of the 19th century, yet inherits all their problems and has acquired some of his own. How do images resolve themselves from the raw material of the perceived world, when that world is fabricated from a mix of palpable and virtual stimuli? How can we renew our sight, when the act of seeing has already been framed within the formats of visual conditioning? By what gestures can a reality be domiciled as an image within the realm of art, to take its place in a wash of readymade images? Afflicted by knowingness and a surfeit of poses drawn from advertising iconography, how do we translate an individual into a portrait? How, in the era of fibre-optics and digital transfer, does vulnerable terrain become unassailable landscape, or an object assume the poise of a still life? When language is no longer reliable and structure is transient, how do collocations of material become infused with the provocative cogency of an installation? Such questions haunt the contemporary artist, who is many generations away from the assurances of inherited technique and a classical aesthetic; and yet, he must continue to shape what is recognisably art from the flow of experience.

In his photographic practice, Binu Bhaskar does not identify, isolate and capture an object with his lens. Rather, he cultivates a field of meditation by shuttling between attentiveness and relaxation, intimacy and distance, familiarity and strangeness, pattern and chance. Bhaskar applies himself to gauging the precise balance between these opposites, until the image manifests itself from the field of meditation as that ‘pledge of order’, radiant against the rich and bewildering profusion of natural effects, which Gadamer discusses in the epigraph set at the head of this essay.

In many of his frames, the artist plays with the architecture of viewing that we have absorbed in the course of our growing-up and education. Having set up the expectation of vanishing-point perspective in his vistas of Indian paddy fields, he refuses us the comfort of a classical horizon; instead, we stumble, flounder and come up against intricate barriers and partitions in his sharply patterned maps. Looking for bearings, our eyes retrace the orientating movement that has been coded into the image. Seeking orientation towards a fixed point that remains elusive, Bhaskar is a compass needle that is always looking for true north.

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Bhaskar’s images are ‘speechless’ only in Gadamer’s precise sense: they address us in languages from beyond the familiar usage of the spoken and the sayable. His photographs convey us into a world of fugitive sensations and half-grasped impressions, intimations of belonging and dreams of the future that are implied rather than declared. Bhaskar’s lens has provided testimony to a range of spaces, places and occasions of encounter. His interiors and their appointments are held in the aura of a poetic intensity; these, as well as many of his exterior images, are informed by a luminous sensitivity to the inexplicable and the mysterious.

He is fascinated by the emergence of forms through the leakages between light and matter; he tests the conditions of limpidity and opacity, probes the effects of shrouding and glare. In ‘Absence’, he confronts us with twin windows, their white drapes washed with light and their skeletal frames standing out like crosses. Elsewhere, trees emerge from mist and the hint of a mountain range: spectral presences. ‘Skin’ has a disquieting elegance: the white shirt on a hanger, somewhat askew, is haunting in its evocation of an absence that possesses weight and gravity and can exert a hold on our imagination.

In ‘Black Rain’, we receive a fine and shattering vision of planetary apocalypse, suggestive of Tarkovsky’s cinema: the lyricism of water and darkness veiling one another is held in counterpoint by the dominant sense of an ending. In other frames, the photographer invites us to explore neatly staked-out fields set against the backdrop of mountains mantled in blue light. And in the series titled ‘Unwanted Spaces’, Bhaskar dwells on the afterlife of habitation and abandonment, by contemplating the details of buildings slipping into desuetude and ruin. Consider the surfaces of brickwork left to the mercies of nature; the ladder propped up and left to itself in a clearing of light; the windows that no one will ever look out of again. The photographer transmutes these moments into elegies for the victims of time’s relentless passage, the churning histories of towns that have become cities and cities that have become unmanageable encyclopaedias of exodus and resettlement.

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I am intrigued by the M. Night Shyamalan-meets-Andy Goldsworthy feel that attends many of Bhaskar’s images. This is especially the case in ‘Sap-consciousness’, a suite of images celebrating an immersion in the agrarian landscapes crafted by human labour from the resources of coastal earth, rain, rivers and skies in western India. Nearly all of these photographs were taken in Kerala, except for a few that record encounters with natural fecundity in the Konkan, the coast immediately to the south of Bombay. This is monsoon India, with its dripping greens, soft browns and clayey yellows; its mottled skies and glassy water bodies. Here, the crop circles of Signs seem to merge and meld with the walls going for a walk through thickets in the Grizedale Forest or at the Storm King Art Center. [2]

The lens presents us with the effects of purposeful activity – embankments, demarcated fields, water courses, roads and bridges – but we are never shown any of the makers of these features. It is almost as if they were invisible, or as though they had completed their mission and left the planet. Pattern is the only trace of the human presence that we are provided, apart from the rare glimpse of a house in the fields. That pattern becomes a precious clue: it presents us with the possibility of mapping and deciphering this terrain by following the logic of the cultivator’s responses to the vagaries of the climate, the economy, and a menaced ecosystem.

Bhaskar’s preoccupation with pattern as a means of ordering the unpredictability of experience, as well as his desire to tease out the symbolic potentialities of landscape, stem from the passionate formal and conceptual interests that drive his photography. A careless viewer may be prompted to apply the label of ‘nature photography’ to these images, but this would be a complete mistake. Look closely at his images of human intervention in natural terrain, and you will find more than the marvels of engineering and agriculture; his pictorial intent is to hold that aspect of a field which proposes a figurative shape, whether womb or vagina, mouth or pitcher. Fields ripening with the promise of harvest are arranged rather like the wings of a blot in a Rorschach test; by tweaking the ratio of symmetry to surprise, Bhaskar orchestrates a resonant detonation at the heart of a seemingly taut composition.

The edge of water has fascinated Bhaskar: he has rendered it as a joyous antiphony between farmland and cloud-roof, but also as a drama of hesitant objects overwhelmed by quivering reflections. Observe, in this context, his scrutiny of the margins where earth and water meet, field holds parley with sky, and object discovers reflection. A cosmic symbolism may grow from these nodes, at first as a private world-view but linked to the sustaining water cosmologies of South Asia’s riparian and littoral cultures. The crafted landscape is farmed again by the eye of the photographer as archaeologist, to yield symbolisms of fertility, quest, confluence and renewal.

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In what may be called his colour pursuits, Bhaskar demonstrates a rather classical Modernist concern with repeatedly addressing and exhausting a theme through the conceptual space afforded by a series. He has worked with white, blue and green, examining the dynamics of depth and density, saturation and variation; he has, in each case, opened himself to the gamut of diverse effects that an apparent singularity holds. For instance, his engagement with green allows him to express a philosophical need to meditate on growth and decay, shape and form, the magic of the human hand and the logic of the seasons; on time, death and the hope of renewal and redemption. At the same time, it permits him to make a subtle political statement about environmental degradation, vanishing habitats, and endangered livelihoods. We are, after all, viewing this exhibition in an epoch marred by the crises of global warming and water-table depletion; and, in India, at a time when small-scale farmers have been placed at a disadvantage by the advent of genetically modified seeds, crop failures have resulted in an alarming number of farmer suicides, and villagers have suffered brutal repression in West Bengal as an unlikely coalition of Left-wing politicians and powerful corporations takes control of traditional agrarian land.

Indeed, Bhaskar’s photographic images mark a specific convergence between an ecological politics and a poetics of the Sublime. With their emphasis on the unasked surplus of vision – the enigmatic within the everyday, the inexhaustible within the finite – Bhaskar’s photographs occupy the threshold between beauty and the Sublime. Bhaskar’s poetics is based on the intuitive disclosure of underlying patterns, and on an attention to the rhythmic play of order and dissolution in natural and human processes; it navigates us in the direction of the sacred, by which I mean, here, that dimension of being which exceeds the ability of our faculties to contain and explain it. And when I employ the adjective ‘ecological’ to designate Bhaskar’s politics, I do so in full awareness of its etymology: the word is derived from the Greek oikos, meaning ‘home’. This definition ripples beyond green politics to embrace such questions as: Where does the contemporary self belong? What part of this over-networked, over-worked planet can it claim as it appropriate sphere of being? Such are the questions that Binu Bhaskar sets out to tackle, as he echo- locates the contours of his lifeworld, measuring the changing distance between the self and its surroundings with his register of images.

(Bombay: November 2007)

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Notes

1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘The speechless image’ (1965), in his The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. with an Introduction by Robert Bernasconi; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 90-91.

2. For Andy Goldsworthy’s ‘Wall’ projects in the Grizedale Forest, Cumbria (UK), and at the Storm King Art Center (USA), see Wall at Storm King: Andy Goldsworthy (with an Introduction by Kenneth Baker, photographs by Andy Goldsworthy and Jerry L. Thompson; London: Thames & Hudson, 2000).

I had been to the library. I had done my research. I had written down why I was going — eight embodiments of Shiva, the five elements, the sun, the moon, and Shiva himself. Tat Tvam Asi (तत् त्वम् असि). I had written it all down carefully, the way you prepare for something you are terrified of. Not for a grant proposal. Not for any gallery.

I was terrified.

I said to myself — when I see all eight together, I will start. I don't know what I was waiting for. A sign. Permission. Something outside me to say yes.

One day I saw all eight. And I started.

I had some nuts. I had a one dollar coin. When I came to a crossroads I tossed the coin. Left or right. The land decided.

It was the happiest walk I have ever taken.

In Bass Strait I worked on a shark fishing boat. One winter we pulled a record catch when no one had planned to fish. I watched the largest lunar eclipse I had ever seen from the water — one that came only once in 144 years.

The walk was for a friend. A fellow student. A great photographer. He had taken his own life. I had no words for it and no ceremony. A pilgrimage — an homage. So I walked. I walked across Gippsland carrying his name, and showed his works to some schools.

At the end of the walk I organised a show. One old bank building in Toora for my own work. One old post office building for the artists I had gathered along the way — people I had met on the road who were making things, quietly.

I asked a well-known music band to play. They said they needed money. I said — the mountains never asked me for money. The sea never asked me for money. They came for free.

The show opened at ten in the morning. The whole road was blocked. Music playing in the street. The South Gippsland Shire had sponsored the show — so the police couldn't say anything. People poured in. It went until evening.

His mother arrived from Perth the day of the show. The friend's mother. I never had her number. I don't know how she knew. She simply came.

I ended the walk with enough money to continue. I had started with one dollar.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this I met a painter in Mirboo North. He opened the door without a question. I arrived dusty and uncertain. His name was William Bridges.

I didn't know then that I had just met the first portrait.

That walk was called Diksha. Initiation.

Not only initiation — also meeting. A teacher, a friend, a door that opens when you are ready to walk through it.

Before that walk I never got much work as a photographer. I worked odd jobs. I painted. I took photographs when I could. The walk was a decision — I will only do what I like. After that walk, till now, I have only done what I liked.

Twenty-seven years later I am still walking the same road. The coin toss has become a camera. The crossroads have become portraits.