Macdonald Nichols

Mac is a Queanbeyan photographer who is originally a product of Industrial Design School and has a long history of teaching Photography and Design in the ACT Senior Secondary system. Mac also has an ongoing relationship with ANU Photography Workshop in various capacities most recently as a participant in the Master of Visual Art program, graduating in 2016. The last few years of Mac’s photographic practice has been an investigation of the marginal unregulated zones at the edge of suburbia where the landscape is defined by the random human activities that take place in the spaces: the private behaviours secretly played out and over time feeding in to the layered evolution of an anxious wasteland often described as a “no-mans-land”.

During his experimental practice Mac has developed a technique of “Flatbedding” using a common flatbed scanner to photographically interpret landscape. He uses flatbedding for it’s objective anonymity and ignorance of the coded vision that a camera and lens automatically bring to a ‘view’ of land. The flatbed image has no horizon or conventional perspective, no reference to time of day and is an exact 1:1 of the ground surface. Mac assembles, arranges and prints the scans to create pseudo scientific surveys of land surface.

Mac and UK Frederick will be collaborating for Promise the Moon and employing flatbedding as a basis for their photographic responses to the Honeysuckle Creek and Orroral Valley Heritage sites.