Syzygy: Gazing at shadows, darkly

To consider an 'ecological gaze' at a time of the putative 'end of nature' is to engage in 'dark ecology', a mournful attendance to global ecological destruction, the collateral termination of the moribund ontological binary 'man/nature' and the concomitant decay of spatial ecological identity. To uncover an ecological gaze photographically is to bear witness to what might be characterized as ecological 'tragedy' for which the germane ocular trope is not a morbid iconography revealed by reflected light but an elegiac index of shadows, and not distancing monocular hubris but a visceral chiasm of binocular seeing, photo-kinetic action and photo-chemical reaction. Such was the rationale of Syzygy, a project about Lake Tyrrell in the Victorian Mallee.