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Richard Woldendorp
Nullarbor, Great Australian Bight, 1985
Richard Woldendorp, one of Australia's most distinguished landscape photographers, was best known for his aerial photographs of the distinctive forms and colours of the remoter regions of the country. His characteristic expansive vistas were achieved through his vision of the landscape but also through modern aircraft and the camera.
Yet Woldendorp's images also have the intricate and jewel-like quality of a medieval illuminated manuscript forming the pages of an imagined Antipodean 'Book of Hours'.
In his aerial works Woldendorp often eliminated the horizon line giving the image an abstract quality which was further enhanced by the use of telephoto lenses which served to compact the spatial planes. He retained recognisable forms and detail of the scene wishing to reveal rather than over-ride nature. While rarely showing people in his landscapes, Woldendorp was not an exclusively 'wilderness' photographer and happily included elements of the built environment in his work.
Woldendorp shot this now classic aerial view of the Great Australian Bight taken just past Baxter Cliffs, for his 1985 book Australia: the Untamed Land.1 The image was used on the cover of the second edition. In the image we see the seemingly silent and empty Nullarbor plain ramparted against what we sense is an immensely deep ocean shelf. The life and dynamic of the picture comes from the contrast of this monumentality with a thin line of clouds, the exquisitely delicate mauve-blue cloud haze stretching away to infinity, and the lacy frill of breaking waves and wiggly-white crest of the ocean swell.
Expatriate author and cultural critic Peter Conrad chose the Great Australian Bight image as the cover of' At Home in Australia, which was published in October 2003 by Thames & Hudson in association with the National Gallery.
When Conrad, who left Australia by ship in 1968 to study at Oxford University, first flew over Australia and the Great Australian Bight on a visit home in 1979, he realised that 'he had never properly seen it at all'.2
Conrad also felt the ancientness of the continent through Woldendorp's pictures and how 'you can almost hear the rending noise as the rock snaps along that abraded edge, or the splash as it submerges. Those low, searingly white clouds in the distance could have been exhaled by the earth as it heaves, convulses, fragments and recreates itself’.
- Richard Woldendorp, Australia : the untamed land / photographs by Richard Woldendorp; [
edited and designed by Ampersand Editions: Readers Digest Services, Sydney, 1985
- Peter Conrad, chapter 2, ‘Earthworks’, At Home in Australia, Thames & Hudson, National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra and London, 2003, p. 35.
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A small selection of photographs
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