Entering Daine Singer, the first encounter is not with Yanni Florence’s work but with Kate Tucker’s Fragment, Unknown. The front gallery is densely occupied by works that move between painting, sculpture and installation. Surfaces are layered, fractured and recombined; paintings escape the conventional stability of the stretched plane; materials gather into structures that remain visibly provisional. Tucker’s interest in fragmentation extends from anonymous pieces of historical glassware in the V&A Museum collection—objects detached from complete histories and left resistant to fixed interpretation. In the gallery, that condition becomes physical. Clay, paint, textiles and steel are accumulated, broken apart and reassembled so that the parts retain something of their separateness even when brought into relation.
The room consequently offers no privileged point from which everything settles. Movement is negotiated around hanging and freestanding forms; the eye moves sideways, then back, while the body adjusts to the interruptions of the installation. Tucker’s exhibition is not the subject of what follows, but its placement matters. By the time one reaches the adjoining room, the expectation that an artwork will present a stable object from a stable viewpoint has already been unsettled. Tucker disperses fragmentation through physical space. Florence encounters a related instability by looking down: compressing interruption, repair and difference into the comparatively narrow plane of the footpath.
The transition into Footpaths is quiet but precise. Directly opposite the entrance, a line of black-and-white photographs extends across the wall, evenly spaced and held at a consistent height. In front of them stands a long wooden table carrying a grid of smaller hand-coloured photographs beneath glass. From the doorway the two structures are seen together: the repeated upright rectangles of the framed prints behind the low horizontal plane of the table. The first movement of the eye is forward; the second is down.
The remaining walls prevent this frontal arrangement from becoming too neat. Three photographs occupy the wall to the left. On the right there is only one, conspicuously isolated within a broad expanse of white. These changes in number are not arbitrary. Florence explains that the groupings correspond to the different cameras used and that mixing the formats would distract from the photographs themselves. Likewise, the continuous line of framed works is intended to emphasise the photographs as objects rather than dissolve them into a wall of imagery. The table performs another function: looking down at its photographs repeats, inside the gallery, something of the bodily orientation involved in looking at a footpath while walking.
The installation therefore does more than display a series about the ground. It stages several different distances from it. One looks across the room at the framed photographs; moves laterally along their sequence; approaches the smaller groupings; bends over the table; catches lights and reflections in its glazing; retreats again. The viewer is never simply presented with a subject. Looking has to be physically recalibrated. The ground, normally experienced as support and passage, has become something that arrests movement.
Ground and Attention
Florence’s primary photographic decision is disarmingly simple: the camera goes down. The horizon disappears. Architecture, street life and landscape are largely removed from the frame even though their material residue remains everywhere. Instead of a city organised perspectivally around a viewer who looks forward, Footpaths offers an urban environment encountered at the level of the surface.
The downward orientation might initially suggest abstraction. Concrete becomes a pale plane crossed by a crack; asphalt becomes a dense black field; a repair assumes the blunt geometry of a shape placed on another shape. Yet Florence’s interest in abstraction is almost the reverse of using the world as raw material for formal composition. In the interview, he describes abstraction as what occurs when something is experienced “as it is” rather than through the use or association normally attached to it: the purpose is not to conceal the subject but to encounter it more fully. The distinction is fundamental. A footpath can approach abstraction precisely because it remains a footpath.
That position separates Florence from the more familiar history of photographic abstraction associated with Aaron Siskind. Siskind’s walls, peeling paint and street surfaces frequently acquire the expressive charge of marks on a pictorial field; their physical origins remain visible, but the photograph courts the language of Abstract Expressionism. Florence’s photographs are cooler and more recalcitrant. Their surfaces can become geometrically strange, but they are not converted into equivalents of brushstrokes. The material refuses to disappear into style. Aggregate remains aggregate; bitumen remains a repair; a fissure remains evidence of pressure, age and movement.
Lewis Baltz offers another useful comparison, particularly in his attention to banal built environments and his suspicion of the spectacular photographic subject. But Baltz usually establishes that estrangement through distance, frontality and analytic control. Florence reduces the distance almost to zero. The camera looks into the surface rather than across it. The world becomes less an object placed before the lens than a plane with which the photographer’s own movement is already entangled.
This embodied relation matters because Florence did not begin by deciding that footpaths would constitute a project. The photographs accumulated among other photographs and were recognised as a series afterwards, through filing, proofing, selection and editing. He does not go out searching for exemplary pavements. He describes repeatedly passing the same place before suddenly seeing the photograph that can be made there, while at other times choosing simply to look. “The photograph is something other than what you photograph,” he says. That sentence provides a more convincing account of Footpaths than any claim that the project catalogues urban surfaces. The image is produced through an encounter, but it is not reducible to the thing encountered.
Marcus Bergner’s catalogue essay approaches this attentiveness through horizontal perception and the bodily experience of being close to the ground. Florence himself recalls the intimacy children have with cracks, stones and small irregularities before adult movement renders such things functionally invisible. He cites Bergner’s wonderful escalation of the familiar association between walking and thinking: if walking aids thought, crawling becomes thought and sensation intensified. What sounds initially whimsical describes something exact about these photographs. They suspend the conventional hierarchy by which the world ahead matters and the ground beneath merely enables arrival.
Phenomenology offers an obvious framework, but it needs to be used carefully here. Florence is not illustrating a philosophical programme. What Footpaths shares with phenomenological thinking is a refusal to separate perception from bodily orientation. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that seeing belongs to an embodied subject rather than a detached optical apparatus helps clarify why the downward camera matters: the ground is not an object newly discovered by photography but part of the body’s continuous negotiation with the world. Michel de Certeau’s account of walking as an everyday spatial practice is relevant for a different reason. The footpath is planned infrastructure, but its actual life consists of countless traversals, repairs, deviations, stains, marks and minor appropriations. Florence photographs the place where abstract planning meets repeated use.
This makes the project quite unlike a conventional typology. The recurrent concrete, bitumen, gravel and bluestone might tempt the viewer to classify. Florence recognises that temptation and explicitly resists it. Typology, he argues, can make work “too digestible”, shifting attention towards completeness of collection and away from the phenomena of experience. The distinction gives Footpaths an illuminating relation to Bernd and Hilla Becher. Like their industrial studies, Florence’s pictures acquire force through repetition and comparison; unlike the Bechers, however, he does not stabilise variation inside a taxonomic system. The series remains open, contingent and incomplete because completeness would misrepresent the way it came into being.
What Florence repeatedly returns to, then, is not classification but attention: the moment at which an ordinary surface stops behaving merely as background.
The Palimpsest
If the series begins with attention, its material vocabulary is repair. Florence is repeatedly drawn to seams, changes in paving, poured additions, tarred joins, fractures and crude corrections. The footpath appears less as a finished object than as an infrastructure maintained through continuous amendment. Florence calls this the metaphor of “forever repairs”: the ground being repeatedly plastered so that people can continue to walk across it. He likes that there is no pure or ideal footpath, not even a new one; every surface receives marks, names, wear and intervention.
Again (2025) makes this condition unusually explicit. The photograph is filled by a dark field of asphalt carrying successive patches of different sizes, densities and tonal values. A large pale repair occupies much of the lower portion of the image, its boundary ragged and granular, while smaller rectangular interventions recede upward. A dark repaired channel runs vertically through the field, cutting across and alongside the other additions. There is something almost diagrammatic in the arrangement, but no underlying grid actually holds. The repairs have occurred when required, not when composition demanded them.
The title sharpens the image without explaining it. Again: the road fails, the surface is opened, material is poured, the repair wears down, another intervention follows. But “again” also belongs to walking and photography—to passing somewhere repeatedly before recognising an image there; to returning to familiar structures without exhausting them. The pavement records recurrence as material accumulation. No repair restores an original state because the idea of an original state has become meaningless.
That principle is differently visible in I Love This Weather (2025). Here two large concrete slabs are divided by a vertical joint. Dark patches of bitumen interrupt the pale surfaces: one pressed against a brick wall at the upper edge, another spreading irregularly across the lower part of the join. Beneath the slabs, grass and weeds form a ragged strip of organic matter. The image therefore contains several orders simultaneously: the modular repetition of brick, the poured consistency of concrete, the improvised density of repair and the unregulated growth at the pavement’s edge.
The photograph is stronger than a simple opposition between culture and nature. Grass is not presented as nature triumphantly reclaiming the city, any more than bitumen is presented as evidence of institutional failure. Each material occupies a different duration. Brick suggests construction; concrete suggests infrastructure; bitumen records maintenance; grass records seasonal persistence. The image is a compressed urban chronology. It asks the viewer to recognise that what appears to be one surface is already many surfaces occupying the same place.
There Is More You Know (2025) operates with less material contrast. A largely pale concrete field is organised by joins and fractures. The first reading is geometric: lines divide the surface into planes and create something close to a grid. But that order deteriorates the longer it is examined. Cracks depart from the joins, change thickness, bend and branch. Some look almost deliberate from a distance and plainly accidental at close range. The image moves between infrastructure and drawing without finally becoming either.
The phrase There Is More You Know might seem to offer an interpretive key, but that would misunderstand Florence’s titles. They are not matched semantically to particular photographs. During his walks he notes things heard or misheard, builds a list, then assigns titles from it with an element of randomness. “Photographs are kind of like words out of context,” he says. The apparent fit between title and photograph is therefore partly produced by the viewer.
This is where the titles become more interesting than a conventional conceptual-art strategy of text destabilising image. Florence identifies Weegee and Mark Cohen as two photographers whose titles he particularly admires: Weegee for titles as blunt as his photographs, Cohen for matter-of-fact phrases that can become unexpectedly poetic. Florence deliberately goes in the opposite direction. His titles do not name anything visible in the photograph. Their arbitrariness gives each image a distinct identity while refusing the descriptive neutrality of Untitled.
The result is not simply a doubling between visual and linguistic information; it is a collision between two kinds of abstraction. A photograph removes a fragment of the visible world from its continuous surroundings. An overheard phrase removes a fragment of speech from the conversation that gave it meaning. Florence then brings the two fragments together. Neither recovers its original context. Instead, a new object comes into existence: I Love This Weather is no longer merely a sentence once heard on a walk, just as the photographed section of pavement is no longer merely the place on which somebody walked.
That operation bears comparison with Mark Cohen more strongly than with Ed Ruscha. Ruscha’s language is generally authored, deliberate and tightly bound to the conceptual economy of the work. Cohen’s titles often possess the strange compression of noticing: Step and Raindrops, to use Florence’s own example, fixes attention without exhausting what the photograph contains. Florence makes the relation still less secure. His titles are contingent encounters attached to other contingent encounters. Their connection is manufactured after the fact, yet once joined they become difficult to separate.
The hand-coloured works on the central table extend this logic materially. These smaller pieces are unique-state works in which Florence applies oil to archival pigment prints. Their colour is neither the restoration of an absent photographic colour nor a decorative supplement to black and white. Florence calls the process a “re-animating” of the experience of taking and viewing the photograph and compares it to psychometry: contact with the photographic object as a means of reactivating experience. Asked how he knows where the colour should go and where it should stop, he compares the decision to conversation—knowing when to speak, what to say and when to stop.
Seen from above through the glazing of the table, the works introduce muted greens, yellows, pinks and reds into a room otherwise dominated by black-and-white prints. Colour often catches on a patch, edge, grid or stain, but it does not simply describe what was there. The intervention creates another temporal layer: photograph after encounter, print after photograph, oil after print. The tabletop is therefore not a colourful appendix to the main sequence. It makes Florence’s central premise physical. A photograph, as he says elsewhere in the interview, has multiple stages—the idea, the exposure, the print, the later act of looking—and each stage is related while remaining “its own thing”.
The footpath itself behaves similarly. It is poured, crossed, cracked, repaired, crossed again. Marks enter and fade. Nothing returns it to purity because purity was never its condition. Footpaths finds its visual intelligence in precisely that refusal of an untouched surface.
Sequence and the Book
Seriality is essential to the project, but Florence’s account of it complicates the idea that the meaning of an individual photograph depends on the sequence. He insists that the photographs remain individual images even when presented as groups or series. Sequencing can bring out that individuality by pairing pictures that invite comparison or placing images together because their differences become more apparent in proximity. The sequence therefore does not subordinate the photograph to a system. It tests each photograph against another.
This distinction matters in the gallery. The long wall initially encourages an overall reading: repeated black frames, white sheets and predominantly grey surfaces establish a strong rhythm before any individual picture has been closely inspected. But walking beside the sequence dismantles that first impression of sameness. One picture may be almost empty; another is dense with repairs. A hard geometric patch is followed by a diffuse tonal field; a line that seems architectural is answered by a fractured edge. Seriality produces difference rather than suppressing it.
John Gossage provides a useful point of comparison because his books likewise make overlooked terrain meaningful through adjacency, pacing and apparently minor shifts. Yet Florence’s relation to sequence is less insistently authorial. The series, by his account, emerges after the photographs. He takes widely, files, proof-prints and selects. Some photographs he likes do not enter the exhibition or the book because they do not fit; another may only work by itself because its tonal structure breaks too sharply with the rest. Editing is not the construction of a thesis from obedient examples. It is a process of discovering which photographs can coexist without losing their autonomy.
The book makes that negotiation particularly visible. Footpaths is Florence’s ninth book of photographs, but it does not simply reproduce the exhibition in portable form. On the wall, several images can be seen simultaneously and revisited by turning the head or retracing a few steps. In the book, the reader encounters photographs as pairs and successions. The gutter creates both separation and relation. One surface sits opposite another; a pale repair encounters a dark stripe; a curve of gravel is followed by the rigid shadow cast across concrete. The reader supplies memory between one spread and the next.
Florence’s preference for portrait orientation contributes to the character of these pages. He says that the format reminds him of “a page of poetry” and is deliberately less cinematic, even though the sequence itself borrows techniques such as jump cuts and transitions from film editing. That description is revealing. The individual photograph is vertically self-contained, but the book produces movement by placing those self-contained units into succession. The page is not a film frame waiting to disappear; it is something that can be held, revisited and compared.
The physical book accompanying the exhibition further complicates the conventional idea of a fixed photobook edition. Florence produces a copy for each purchaser of an exhibited print and places the purchased photograph on that copy’s cover. He calls the project an experiment in on-demand production and speaks enthusiastically about the “democratisation of bookmaking” made possible by inexpensive digital printing services. This interest extends into his Light of Day publications, a low-cost series bringing together photography by figures including Helmut Newton, Hans Bellmer, Mark Cohen and Ruth Maddison alongside lesser-known practitioners.
The variable cover is more than an attractive conceit. It refuses the idea that there is one privileged image capable of standing permanently for the entire series. Every purchased work can become the book’s threshold. The series remains constant inside while its exterior identity changes according to a specific encounter between work and collector. A supposedly reproducible publication acquires a contingent relation to one image.
Florence is also refreshingly unsentimental about the photobook itself. Asked what the book can do that the exhibition cannot, he replies that it lasts longer and is more intimate, then immediately observes that photobooks are becoming “more and more a trope”. He is increasingly interested in alternative forms of circulation, including the possibility of leaving photographs in public places for strangers to discover. For a practising book designer with nine books of his own photographs, this scepticism matters. The photobook is not treated as the inevitable culmination of serious photographic practice. It is one form among others through which the photograph can acquire another life.
The book and exhibition thus share a principle without duplicating one another. Both are structures of relation. The gallery asks the body to move between wall, table and isolated images. The book asks the hands and eyes to negotiate adjacency, page-turn and return. Neither seeks to settle the series into a complete taxonomy. Each creates temporary arrangements through which individuality becomes more, not less, perceptible.
Practice, Context and Position
Florence’s biography helps explain this sensitivity to arrangement without reducing the work to professional training. He is a photographer, filmmaker and book designer; he co-founded Pataphysics Magazine in 1989 and completed a Bachelor of Architecture at RMIT in 1997. Footpaths follows eight previous books: Self Conscious (Skoob Books, 2009), Southland (M.33, 2014), Animal Life (M.33, 2014), Street Porn (M.33, 2014), Immolation (M.33, 2015), HE IS IN THE CITY (M.33, 2017), Tram Windows (M.33, 2019) and Trees and Fences (M.33, 2023). His work has appeared in Melbourne Now at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2013, the NGV Triennial in 2021 and exhibitions at ReadingRoom in 2019 and 2022.
It would be easy to use the architecture degree as an explanatory shortcut for photographs full of planes, joints and built surfaces. Florence himself resists that account. He calls himself a “failed architect” and describes architectural education as almost destroying his ability to think because of its demand for conformity. Photography became the opposite: a practice in which the flattening of a three-dimensional world into two dimensions could remain strange rather than instrumental. Architecture matters, then, less as a source of formal discipline than as something against which the freedom of photographing became legible.
His earlier bodies of work show that Footpaths did not suddenly produce an interest in overlooked urban structures. Southland, Tram Windows and Trees and Fences all redirect attention towards apparently secondary conditions: the shopping centre, the window through which a familiar city is seen, the repetitions and obstructions of suburban boundaries. Yet Florence himself identifies an important change in Footpaths: it is “less confrontational”. Photography, he says, can possess a predatory quality, and this work became a retreat from that condition, perhaps an attempt to transcend it.
That observation gives the downward gaze an ethical dimension without converting the project into an ethical programme. To photograph people is not inherently predatory, nor is photographing pavements inherently innocent. But Footpaths deliberately removes the photographer from the familiar exchange in which another person becomes subject. Attention is transferred to a shared surface bearing anonymous evidence of many people without turning any of them into the object of the camera. Footprints are absent; use is everywhere.
The difference from conventional street photography is considerable. Street photography normally depends on the encounter with an event, gesture, collision or human configuration that cannot be repeated. Florence’s footpaths may be revisited indefinitely. The decisive moment, if there is one, lies not in a fleeting event outside the photographer but in the moment the photographer becomes capable of seeing the photograph in something traversed perhaps a hundred times before.
His attraction to Mark Cohen becomes especially suggestive in this context. Cohen’s photographs are often made at unnervingly close range, cutting bodies and objects into fragmentary encounters; Florence retains something of that closeness while redirecting it away from human subjects. Footpaths can consequently feel intimate without being invasive. The camera is near, but what it approaches cannot return the gaze.
That retreat from confrontation also clarifies the work’s abstraction. Abstraction here is not distance from reality; it is the dismantling of habitual use. A path is normally understood teleologically: it exists to get somewhere. Florence interrupts that logic. Once the viewer stops treating the pavement as a means of passage, its apparent simplicity dissolves into aggregate, fissure, shadow, repair, line, discarded leaf and tonal variation. The ordinary becomes strange not because the photographer transforms it dramatically but because attention has ceased to be instrumental.
In this respect, Tim Ingold’s writing on lines and movement offers a productive conceptual parallel. A path is not only a line drawn on a plan; it is formed through movement and continually experienced through movement. Florence’s photographs arrest such paths without making them static. Their marks imply previous crossings and future ones. Henri Lefebvre’s insistence that everyday space is socially produced rather than neutrally given is relevant for much the same reason. The humble pavement is public infrastructure, administrative object, material construction and lived surface simultaneously. Florence photographs none of those categories in isolation. He finds them sedimented together.
Yet he resists turning this complexity into a theory imposed before the photograph. His account of how series form is emphatically retrospective. He never wanted to become “a photographer that worked in series”; the series emerges through editing, selection and making the work public. His first book, Self-conscious, gathered photographs made between the ages of eleven and eighteen and, as he notes, is about as far from a serial project as possible, though it already contains ideas that later became sustained bodies of work.
That retrospective formation may be one of the most important aspects of Florence’s practice. The photographs begin dispersed. Organisation arrives later. What looks in the gallery like a rigorous conceptual programme retains, underneath, the contingency of looking. The discipline lies not in deciding in advance what the world must provide, but in recognising relations among photographs after they exist.
The Exhibition’s Ending
This is why Footpaths ultimately resists the clean closure of either typology or argument. The exhibition is highly organised, but organisation never produces the fantasy that the subject has been exhausted. The repeated frames on the wall establish coherence; their individual surfaces undo it. The table gathers small works into a grid; hand colouring makes every one a unique state. The titles give photographs identities while refusing to explain them. The book fixes a sequence while changing its cover from one copy to another. Everywhere Florence establishes an order and then leaves enough contingency inside it for experience to remain unsettled.
Even the photographs contain the same contradiction. A seam is intended to join but divides. A repair is intended to restore but becomes another visible rupture. A path is intended to facilitate movement, yet here it arrests it. Again is less a lament about failed maintenance than a description of the ordinary condition of urban material: correction becomes history and history requires another correction. In I Love This Weather, built surface, patch and vegetation coexist without arriving at a stable hierarchy. The more precisely the photographs describe these things, the less plausible the idea of a single, complete surface becomes.
The exhibition therefore does not conclude in a conventional sense. The sequence reaches the edge of the wall and stops; elsewhere a photograph occupies the wall almost alone, its scale diminished by the white space surrounding it. Continuity breaks without producing resolution. What has been established is not a final interpretation of the ground but a method of attending to it: surfaces held in relation, differences made perceptible without being fixed into a closed system.
The ground, once passed over without notice, has been held long enough to register its structure—marked, repaired, uneven, continuous in its interruptions. It does not yield a final meaning so much as resist the demand for one. On leaving the gallery, the photographs inevitably lose their exceptional status. Concrete becomes concrete again; bitumen returns to maintenance; the pavement resumes its ordinary work beneath the body. But something in the relation has changed. The ground returns to being what it was all along: something to be walked over and, occasionally, to be seen.
The abstraction is what happens when you experience something as it is, not what it is meant to be. — Yanni Florence
In the conversation that follows, Florence discusses the contingent formation of Footpaths, his resistance to typology, the role of overheard language, the hand-coloured works, the book and the wider trajectory of a practice that repeatedly discovers its subjects only after looking has already begun.
Footpaths concentrates on pedestrian surfaces across Melbourne. What led you to recognise these sites as a coherent body of work?
I started taking the photographs of footpaths alongside everything else I was photographing. When I file my photographs, I create folders, and these sometimes become a series of work. So, it happened and was recognised over time rather than being planned.
These are elements of the city usually registered only in passing. What holds your attention there?
I think, in part, it might be age-related. When you are a kid, you are down on the ground playing and exploring all sorts of cracks and stones. When you are older, you are looking down to avoid tripping over the cracks and stones or just avoiding distraction while you think. In between being young and old, you are “busy,” and all this more or less passes you by unnoticed. Marcus Bergner got it in his text for the exhibition: “well known are the benefits to thinking from walking, whereas crawling, somatically, is thinking and sensing on steroids (hence these photos: substitute crawling-paths for footpaths).”
When you are working, what determines that a particular section of ground becomes an image?
That’s a good question. For every photograph I take, there are many I could take but don’t, while I just enjoy looking rather than photographing. There are times I would pass something a number of times before I see the photograph I take. I’ve walked the same footpath a hundred times before I see a photograph in that footpath I take. I don’t actually go out looking for footpaths to photograph. I don’t know the answer to this. It’s something to do with what happens in the moment. The photograph is something other than what you photograph.
The photographs return repeatedly to seams, repairs, and shifts in material. What draws you to those points?
I see patterns and geometry in footpaths and it’s tempting to think it has some kind of significance. But what really means something to me is the experience of the footpath. Having said that, there is also the metaphor of the forever repairs that footpaths undergo, the plastering up of the ground so we can walk over it. I like that there is no pure or ideal footpath, that they all have marks, even the new ones where people have written their names in them. Actually, there are no bad footpaths or footpaths I think are not worth photographing. And to me, there are no bad photographs. All photographs are a miracle.
Are those decisions made at the moment of photographing, or later in the edit?
The photographs are their own thing. You can take a photograph you think will work, but it doesn’t. You can take a photograph that you don’t think will work, and it turns out to work. I particularly like seeing little details in the photographs that I didn’t notice when taking them, for instance with the footpath photographs there are some beautiful small twigs and leaves that I only noticed once I saw the print. All the stages of photographs are related but are their own thing: the idea, the taking of the photograph, the printing, looking at the photograph, and the photograph over time are all different.
The images approach abstraction but remain tied to specific materials—concrete, bitumen, bluestone. Where does that balance resolve for you?
The abstraction is what happens when you experience something as it is, not what it is meant to be. When it loses its relationship to what you associate it with, it becomes something very real. For me the intent is to use abstraction not to hide what the subject is, but to really experience what the subject is.
The work is often experienced as a sequence. How do you establish the relation between one photograph and the next?
While the photographs are in groups or a series, I think they are individual images. The sequencing is about bringing out that individuality, sometimes by pairing — which can actually highlight differences by prompting comparisons — and sometimes by contrasting.
What governs inclusion and exclusion when you begin editing?
I take lots of photographs. I select a lot to proof print. I then select from those the ones to do prints, then select from them the ones to exhibit or publish. There are some photographs not in the exhibition or book that I like, but they just don’t fit. Sometimes there is just not enough room. Composition and tone also play a part in the edit. There is one photograph not in this exhibition that only works by itself because of the tone difference. It might be going to Japan by itself for an exhibition there.
The materials are not organised into categories or typologies. Was it important to avoid fixing the work into a system?
There is a temptation to pursue this kind of work in terms of typology, but I think that can make the work too digestible, and you can lose the experience of it in the process. Typologies are interesting but they can be more about the completeness of the collection and less about the phenomena of experience. Though I do love obsessive typologies and would be very interested in one on footpaths.
In the exhibition, the photographs are installed as a continuous horizontal line. How did that structure develop?
It seems the best way of focusing on the work as objects as opposed to a wall covered in prints. The table with the photographs on it under glass furthers the experiential quality of the exhibition. When you are looking down at the works on the table, it is a bit like looking down at a footpath while you walk.
At certain points, the sequence condenses into smaller groupings. What determines that shift?
The size grouping relates to the cameras that were used. If I mixed the sizes together, I think you would be more distracted from thinking about the photographs.
The hand-coloured works introduce a different treatment of the surface. Why was that necessary here?
The hand colouring is a re-animating of the experience of taking and viewing a photograph. It is an interaction with the photograph. I see it as a kind of psychometry.
How do you determine where colour is applied, and where it stops?
It’s similar to having a conversation with someone, knowing or not knowing what to say, when to say it, and when to stop saying it.
The titles are drawn from overheard fragments of speech. When did that enter the work?
Previously I have used “Untitled” for my work. This time, I had made some notes of things I heard or misheard while walking around and decided to use them as titles. They are random and don’t correspond to specific photographs, but as an idea, I liked attaching these words or snippets of sentences to the photographs. The titles are abstractions from overheard conversations, like the photographs are abstractions from what I see. There is an irony in this abstraction as the photographs and titles become their own thing, as in not abstract. It’s a phenomenon thing. I’m trying to share and spread the phenomena of experiencing the footpath, either as an idea or by presenting the photograph as an object. Hence the photographs float in the frame as opposed to being de-objectified with a matte border or framing to the edge of the print.
How do you select those fragments?
I have a list I put together over time, and I just choose from the list as and when I am assigning the names. The randomness makes it stranger. Photographs are kind of like words out of context.
What role do the titles play in relation to the photographs?
My two favourite photographers’ titles are Weegee’s and Mark Cohen’s. Weegee’s titles are as blunt and hard-hitting as his photographs, like his photograph titled “Their First Murder.” With Mark Cohen’s books, I like to look at the photographs and try to guess the titles he has given each one. Sometimes I get close, but his titles always surprise me. His titles become succinct, matter-of-fact poetic insights into what you are looking at, like “Step and Raindrops.” I’ve gone the opposite way. My titles don’t reference anything in the images literally. They are random titles for the sake of titles. And they do their bit to give each photograph its own identity beyond being part of a series that a title like ‘Untitled’ might not provide.
When did Footpaths take form as a book?
The Footpaths book was an experiment in on-demand printing. I do a book for each person who buys a print and put the photograph they buy on the cover. I design lots of books for artists and galleries and museums and have an ongoing interest in all types of printing. I like the democratisation of bookmaking these online services provide. I like low-cost printing, and I publish a series of low-cost publications each year called Light of Day. These are selections of photography by photographers and artists that have not been seen before or have not been seen for a long time. Helmut Newton, Hans Bellmer, Mark Cohen, and Ruth Maddison are some of the better-known authors, but there are also lesser-known ones. They are only $10 each and are available in store or online from World Food Books.
What does the book allow that the exhibition does not?
The book lasts longer. It is more intimate. But photobooks are becoming more and more a trope. I’m increasingly inclined to try other ways of sharing my work. I recently read Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, and that made me think of leaving photographs in places for random people to find.
Your background in architecture deals directly with surface, structure, and material. How does that inform the way you photograph these sites?
Studying architecture almost destroyed my ability to think. Schools are very conforming, and working in architecture is more so. Photography as a sole activity was the opposite. I didn’t last in architecture. I call myself a failed architect. I ultimately realised that what got me into architecture was my interest in books on architecture and photographs of architecture. The flattening of the three-dimensional world into two dimensions is such an odd thing.
You have also worked in film. Does that influence how you think about sequence and progression?
I mostly orient my photographs in portrait format. I like how it looks like a page of poetry. For me, it is purposefully less cinematic-looking. However, the sequencing does use film editing techniques such as jump cuts and transitions.
Across earlier series—Southland, Tram Windows, Trees and Fences—you have focused on overlooked elements of the built environment. What has changed in Footpaths?
This work is less confrontational. Photography can inherently have a predatory aspect to it. This work was a retreat from that or an attempt to transcend it.
Where does this work lead you next?
I’d like to dig a deep hole in the ground in the city and stand in the hole and take photographs of people looking down into the hole as they pass by. That could be the next logical step? I’d also like to take photographs with the title of insects like “The Ant” or “The Caterpillar,” with the insect tiny in a large photograph so it’s very hard, almost impossible to find. But actually, I have lots of ideas for work that I probably won’t ever do, but I enjoy coming up with them.
Is there anything from your earlier series that you see differently now, in light of this one?
I really didn’t want to be a photographer that worked in series. In some ways, I’m not. It just comes out that way after the fact as an outcome of editing, selecting, and making it public. If you look at all the photographs I take over any given week, there is a lot less objective sense to it. I did my first book Self-conscious in 2009; it is a collection of photographs I took between the age of eleven and eighteen. It’s as far from serial work as you can get. But in it are many of the ideas that I later pursued and have become work that has formed a series.
Exhibition Details
Yanni Florence
Footpaths
Daine Singer
Brunswick, Naarm/Melbourne
