Thoughtfactory: Leica poetics

Leica, film, snaps, chronicles, cliches

photographic poetics

Just when I'd decided to definitely give up using my venerable  Leica M4-P and 35m colour film,   and make  the definite  shift to the cutting technological edge of  hand held digital imaging, up pops this image.  

It is a simple and nondescript  coastal bush growing along the railway line  and the picture  was made on one of my early morning poodle walks at Hayborough, Victor Harbor on the Fleurieu Peninsula. It is what is  usually ignored or a disregarded  aspects of the contemporary coastal  landscape that would  be seen as the "unphotographable"  by many contemporary DSLR photographers. 

What popped up  is photography as poetics. Photography in a quiet voice. 

Therein lies the strength of a film Leica ---whether colour or black and white---in today's digital world where  the global trend is to product differentiation and short product cycles in which  companies  reduce costs by re-using as many components as possible.   We have reached a point where different digital cameras and systems converge to the same level of performance,  and the differences that exist are increasingly irrelevant for the average user.  In this world it is the camera's features that become the crucial markers  for the tech journalists ever on the lookout  for the next big thing to write about.    

Photography as poetics points to the mood, feeling and emotion that an image  creates or produces.  This is a revision of the classical Leica ethos  of a camera  designed to  record daily events as a visual memory: thirty-six memories on one roll of film that are an honest and detailed record of the world.

This kind of photography  is not about perfection.  That's definitely the world of high end digital.  The world of the hyper real. Nor  is it an expression of photographs being a way to freeze and retain a moment, a piece of reality that can never be again. This is photography as an art of nostalgia. 

It is more along the lines of photography‘s ability to reveal the unfamiliar in the familiar and  to destabilise  our regular perception without embracing the view that poetics  points to the presence of a hidden reality,  the idea that the world is not fully understandable, and that it is vain to even try and understand the world.