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