Title: SALT
Photographer: Emma Phillips
Date of publication: November, 2013
Place of Publication: Melbourne, Australia
Language: English
Dimensions of book: 370 x 260 mm
Number of pages: 40
Edition size: 500
Publisher: Self-published
Distributor: Perimeter Books
Retail price: $39.95 AUD
Summary of Project:
Young Melbourne photographer Emma Phillips’ new body of landscape images is so striking in its minimalist visage that it almost borders on abstraction. Shot amid the dramatic manmade undulations of a salt mine, SALT hints at many of the tropes of the landscape and picturesque tradition, only for the subject itself – the huge, white mounds of glistening salt – to cause a slippage. It’s a familiar form, but an alien landscape. Phillips also traces fragments of industrial and domestic infrastructure within this strange environment. The arc of a conveyor belt juts obliquely from towering apex of salt; a caravan, itself blasted white, sits oxidising in the midst of a vast, sun-beaten, white plane; an orange digger chugs across an otherwise colourless frame. Phillips has used salt as an allegory – reduced and economised – for the Australian interior.
— Dan Rule. The Age, December 7, 2013
