The southern part of South Australia has been in drought since last year. There has hardly been any rain in autumn so far -- just a few intermittent showers.   These showers have  not been  enough  to lessen the soil moisture deficiency. There has been no Autumn Break -ie., no  decent autumn rainfall. The cause is  the  slow-moving, high pressure weather systems that have resulted in the persistent warm and dry conditions with their minimal breaks of rain-bearing  weather.

The native bushes along the coast,  which  are adapted to  surviving the long,  dry summer months,  are dying, or have died. The dying bushes  don't look pretty.  They  look ugly and my  experience  of being amongst them  is not one of pleasure. It is an unpleasant experience -- which is different  to  recoiling from the  disgusting or the monstrous. The  possibility of drought from the projected lack of rainfall due  climate heating being  the future gives rise  to an underlying  anxiety and fear.

The ugly is usually seen as the negative of the beautiful in classical aesthetics---the ugly is traditionally understood  as deviation from the norms or practices that set the standards for beauty.  The ugly is an unwelcome phenomenon that, like a weed in a garden, should be avoided in— or eradicated from— landscapes, artworks,  and to be replaced by its purported converse, beauty.

However, photography's  commitment to realism entails the artistic representation of  ugliness. Photographing the effects of drought brings ugliness as an aesthetic value into the foreground,  and it opens up the ugly to being  more than either the  antithesis  of the beautiful,  or the concept of the harmony of both beauty and the ugly.    The category of beauty declines in Modernist art, which also   defied  the traditional prohibition of the ugly -- eg., Picasso's Guernica (1937).  Dissonance is the technical term for the reception through art of what aesthetics as well as common sense  calls ugly. 

Representing the effects of drought involves  shifting away from the traditional subjectivity of artistic intention and  personal expression to photography's  public significance.   What constitutes the aesthetic value of a work on this view is not so much the creative originality  of the individual artist,  but rather the capacity of the photographer's  work to enact for others the moral and political demands of a particular social or natural context--in this case drought.   This  giving voice to the seriousness of photography opens up a space to  articulate the social dimension of the aesthetic. 

The drought highlights how in this public context the ugly as the effects of the ongoing destruction of nature  is a thing unto itself; it has an independent status. It is an aesthetic category of its own.  The role of the ugly is to  reflect the suffering and pain of our culture in order to criticize  it: the force of art in all its ugliness, she suggests, is to function as critique.

Below are 2  archival images made whilst  I was walking in the Beech Forest on the Kepler Track near  Shallow Bay,  Lake Manapouri in Southland, New Zealand,  circa February 2020. The Kepler Track is around 60km in length  and is situated  between Lake Manapouri and Lake Te Anau.

We stayed several days at Lake Manapouri near the Waiau River. There are some associated photos from walking the Kepler Track in the  Fiordland National Park on an earlier post.  Whilst walking this section of the Kepler Track I was  aware of how the  natural world  is ever changing, does things,  and  it has a history. This perspective gave rise to  the idea of a philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie) that engages with how we view, and think of,  the natural world. 

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I have been doing some haphazard reading  about Heidegger rethinking and conception of  poetics and   poiesis in order to develop  my understanding of, and explore  the possibilities  f photography as a poetics. 

Heidegger is difficult going and I've been struggling to understand what he is trying to do.  Heidegger's   reflections on art as poiesis highlights that it is directed toward the question of being and that it  locates the artwork as a specific modality of truth, a way in which truth can occur. This is premised on n decisively ontological distinction between the product (reduction of beings to  the will of the human being) and the work of art.  The artwork is traditionally distinguished from the product insofar as it is not merely formed matter, but formed matter that shows something other than itself, that in some way has an intellectual content or meaning.

The end point  of Heidegger's account of poiesis is that it is  a mode of disclosure  (a-letheia) of being in general (usually referred to as Being) Poiesis refers to  beings themselves to come to presence into the unhidden.   

This  account emerges from  Heidegger's  re-discovery of the pre-Socratics (eg., Heraclitus)  as  distinct from assimilating the pre-Socratics  to Plato and Aristotle, whom Heidegger interpreted as  the foundation  of Western philosophy.  The appropriation and critique of Aristotle lies at the very  heart of Heidegger's philosophical enterprise  regarding the question of being and its history. The  past from out of which we think has to be re-appropriated and interpreted anew, and his pathway was  to  rethink Greek ontology ‘more originally than’ the Greeks themselves.  Heidegger’s critique of the tradition (Aristotle) attempts to think more originally than this tradition in order to transform it.

In the foundational Greek  philosophy, according to Heidegger,   poiesis was orientated to everyday production: ie., the artist  projects an image of the object  i.e. its intended look with the artist shaping the raw material into an artefact thereby  fulfilling this intention.with the product becoming a likeness of imitation of this image/model. This representational model of art is premised on the subject/object  duality. Heifdegger initially accepts this model of poiesis,   but he then deconstructs it by way of returning to the pre-Socratics: he sees them differently to Plato and Aristotle. 

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The picture below is from a morning walk along the coastal rocks  in the  littoral  zone of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula ---probably the platform of rocks just after  Dep's Beach: 

I have been reading about the history of the modern 35mm system camera as a result of some  experiments using  a 1960  Zeiss-Ikon Contaflex Super (SLR)  and some expired 35mm Fuji Velvia 50 that had been gifted to me.  I knew next to nothing about Zeiss-Ikon, only that Zeiss today make high quality lenses, and so I wanted to learn about what happened to the German camera industry before Japanese innovation swept all before them,  what had been lost and what is now absent.  

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This is a companion post to this previous one. 

That post explored the photographer being immersed in the bushland rather than separate from it. It asked the question: 'can the idea of  photography as poetics  provide a different conception of truth to the  indexical  correspondent one, which is  the traditional understanding of truth in photography.'

The photo can  disclose a moment in the bushland. Photography as poiesis is a mode of disclosure  (aletheia) of being. Discloses in the sense of opens up or unconceals. In doing so the photo is  both a poetics and is thoughtful.

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The picture  below is a representation of a landscape detail that was made  whilst  I wandering  in the Waitpinga bushland in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula on a poodlewalk with Maleko. At the time  I was exploring the  possibilities of  b+w poetics: 

It would have been in the late afternoon during the winter  months as I do not walk  in the bushland with the standard poodles in spring or summer in the afternoon because of the Eastern brown snake, which  are venomous. 

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The picture below is of a small rock pool near Bunyip Chasm in the  Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges  in South Australia. We were staying in a hut  for a week or so  there in 2021.  This particular  rock pool  was at the beginning  of the gorge.

Just further on  a large and deep rock pool between the gorge's  steep cliffs prevented us from going any further  into the gorge and on past the water falls.  We just didn't have  the time to bypass or go round  this rock pool by climbing up the cliffs to reach the chasm itself.   

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The photo below was made in the early morning at Gassan Shizu Hot Springs at  Nishikawa in the Yamagata Prefecture.   We had just spent the last week or so on a Basho walking tour in  the Tohoku region in  Honshu, Japan.  The tour had  started in Sendai and Gassan Shizu was  the last morning of the  fascinating l Basho walk 

 Mt. Gassan, one of the three  sacred mountains of Dewa Sanzan is in the background. The other two sacred mountains are Mt Yudono and Mt Haguro, which had visited  prior to our overnight  stay at Gassan Shizu.

Shortly after I'd made the  above photo the tour  was taken by the hotel  bus to Yamagata Station where we went our separate ways.   We  travelled by  Shinkansen to Tokyo then on to Osaka  to begin walking  the Kumano Kodo pilgrim trail, self-guided. 

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The  well known fragment  123 of Heraclitus reads: "Nature loves to hide itself'.

The Australian bush can be quite messy, dense  and chaotic  and  quite  difficult to walk in and  to photograph. Often there are no pathways through the thicket  and you have to go around it.

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The previous post finished by asking:'  What then is poiesis that is uncovered by the twisting free and  the stepping back to the more or less hidden sources of the Leica street photography tradition?'

The  stepping back in the post was to a birth certificate of photography, namely   Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's earliest surviving camera photograph, circa 1826: View from the Window at Le Gras (Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France). It is a stepping back to photography's own mimetic presuppositions in preparation for an overcoming; a self-overcoming of photography  itself. This stepping back to is coupled to a  step forwards; that is the  photographic past from out of which we think is  re-appropriated and interpreted anew. It is re-interpreting the original  photographic presuppositions  as other to  the street photography tradition's   interpretations of the birth certificate of photography. 

The other that is uncovered is photography as poetics or poiesis. What then is poiesis?

The influential interpretation -- that of Benjamin mimetic faculty and behaviour and  Adorno's  adapation and assimilation to others  ---  is poiesis is mimesis with Adorno giving a historical account of the development of the various meanings  of mimesis that is counterpoised to, and been repressed by,  instrumental reason through the historical civilising process.  With Heidegger poiesis stands  opposed to the calculative constructions of technological enflaming in which being is reduced to a standing reserve or a resource ordered and controlled by the modern techno-sciences.This is an ontological reduction of things to their utility  and nature to a resource.     

 This reflection on the poetic (or poietic, to use the Greek term)  refers to Aristotle's conception of poiesis as making or producing things and the conception of artistic creation and  craftwork that is oriented to the horizon of production. The process of making is definite: it has a definite beginning: the blue print of the product. It has a definite end: the completion of the product. For Aristotle, the end of poiesis is beyond poiesis itself since the finished product is always for someone and something, for the use to which it can be put.  

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