Salt, made by Murray Fredericks during sixteen solo journeys to Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre in South Australia between 2003 and 2010, examines the usually dry salt lake as a field of light, space, and perception.
Fredericks conceived the project as a departure from his earlier photographs of mountainous, feature-rich environments, prompted in part by a visit to a Bolivian salt lake. Rather than describing Lake Eyre geographically, he sought to communicate the freedom and release he associated with prolonged exposure to emptiness. Solitude, fatigue, repetition, and duration became part of an inquiry into how perception changes when familiar markers of scale disappear. The site is Country of the Arabana people, whose continuing connection to its lands and waterways is acknowledged in later museum presentations.
Across the color photographs, salt crust, shallow water, sky, weather, and atmospheric light form a restricted visual vocabulary. An uninterrupted horizon, usually placed in the lower third, divides the frame without revealing the lake's edge. This repeated structure anchors the scene while allowing distinctions between foreground and background, distance and surface, to become uncertain. Cracked ground, reflective water, cloud, and changing hues remain legible, yet the compositions frequently approach abstraction. Their limited elements and serial repetition create a quiet, suspended mood.
Fredericks initially worked with a traditional 8 x 10-inch film view camera and avoided ultra-wide lenses, aiming to flatten perspective and withhold conventional cues to scale. The photographs were presented as large digital pigment prints on cotton rag. Panoramas shown in 2009 combined ten to twenty horizontal frames, while experiments in the project's final year used a medium-format digital back on a digital view camera to stitch wider fields.
First exhibited in Sydney in 2006, the photographs later appeared at Hamiltons in London, the Australian Centre for Photography, Paris Photo, and other international venues. The National Gallery of Victoria acquired Salt 129 in 2009. The Lake Eyre inquiry subsequently developed through the related Vanity, Array, and Blaze series.
