In this earlier post I mentioned that in December 2022 my  Leica M4-P and the Summicron 50mm  lens were  damaged from a rogue wave surging over me whilst I was photographing on the rocks along the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. 

Leica advised that the lens was unrepairable but that  they could repair  the camera body. The rangefinder body is now with the Leica workshop in Wetzlar,  Germany and I've been advised that there is a 6 months wait for analogue camera repairs.  So I will  need to acquire  another 50mm lens. 

The film (Kodak Portra 400 ASA ) that was in the camera at the time of the salt-water accident was developed and I have recently scanned it. This is one frame:

My reaction was well,  now that is rather interesting, but it sure is an expensive way to achieve a different look to film. I do not recommend this kind of alternative processing. Could it be done by processing the negatives in saltwater? 

The photo  below was made on an early morning  poodlewalk with Kayla in 2022 in the local bushland in Waitpinga on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. The photo was made around the same time as this black and white one. 

Kayla and I did a lot of  our early morning walks in this particular  bushland,  as it was one of her favourite places to walk in. We would  come across  foxes, rabbits and  kangaroos in the winter/spring months and  so there were lots of scents for there.  She would wait whilst I photographed. On this occasion  I was attracted by the subtle colours of the bark and the leaves. 

This image  is produced by  a form of lens-based photography as distinct from the photographic.  Then former involves creating images using light,  a camera and film.  (Digital technology replaces film with a sensor.)   We need to make a distinction  between photography and the photographic  and to see them as two distinct entities,  given the emergence of AI-generated images. Our  photographic language has become a free floating entity separated from (lens-based ) photography and it now has a life of its own.

That is our starting point in the current situation.   

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From the 2020 archives and  a trip to NZ  pre the global Covid-19 pandemic. 

I didn't take many photos with the analogue Leica M-4 P rangefinder on this trip as  I was in the process of giving 35mm  film photography away. Digital photography was far better in low light situations  and Kodak colour negative film was becoming rather  expensive.  

The photo below is of trees on the banks of  the Waiau River  at Lake Manapouri in the Southland region of the South Island.

We were staying at Lake Manapouri at the time,  monitoring the pandemic situation and keeping an eye on whether  Australia would close  its borders.  We wondered if we would  be able to finish our trip. The Europeans that  we meet still thought that they could  keep on travelling between countries. The possibility of  Australia and New Zealand closing their borders was considered to be remote. 

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This picture or representation of quartz was made whilst I was on a coastal poodlewalk in Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia with Maleko, our standard poodle,  in the late afternoon. It was made around the same time as this image which is on the same 35mm roll of colour negative film.

 If it was overcast in the afternoon we would often wander  amongst these rocks on the  poodlewalks,  as the afternoon light is behind us and the soft light brings out the muted and subtle colours of  the rocks and quartz. 

This representational image of quartz is deemed to be a document created using a  transparent medium to produce an image that is readily intelligible. Hence it is a cliche that needed to be subverted by opening up the photographic process to explore the  possibilities of the photographic mediation of the world. That rejection of photographic transparency is the perspective of art history's account of the history of photography and it highlights how the logic of  20th century modernism is a culture of negation.   

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The two  bark abstracts below  were my initial attempt at abstract poetics with  black and white film (IlFord HP5 Plus 400 ASA). I was reading Lyle Rexer's The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography at the time. Most of the recent photographic abstractions are digital and  in colour eg., the various artists in the Helsinki School.   I had little interest in the cameraless photogram or directly changing the surface of unexposed photographic papers by burning, soaking, inscribing them etc as did Marco Breuer. 

Could abstraction work now by returning to back and white film?  So after Leica  replaced the damaged range finder of  the M4 I   decided to experiment by using 35mm black and white film.  I was more or less picking up from where I'd left off prior to the photographic culture's  shift to digital technology in the first decade of 21st century.   

I had stopped photographing in  35mm black and white in the 1990s when the range finder of the M4  was damaged and it could not be repaired in Australia.   Since my return to photography  around 2006 I have only photographed with  35mm in colour using  an M4-P rangefinder.  

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The pictures below and over the page were made in 2021 whilst Maleko and I were on an afternoon  poodlewalk in  the littoral zone in Waitpinga in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula of  South Australia. We often walk along this section of the coast in the late afternoon. Photographically speaking, this littoral zone  works best in low or flat sunlight. It is no good in the bright afternoon sunlight of summer.

The pictures were made  with  my Leica M4-P with a  rigid Summicron 50mm pre-asph lens. As mentioned in an earlier post the rangefinder  recently became salt damaged from a rogue wave surging over me whilst I was photographing.  Leica  in Germany have since informed me that the lens is kaput (ie.,  unrepairable), but that they can repair the camera body.   I have given the go ahead  to repair the camera and  I am hoping that the insurance will cover most of the cost of buying a second hand Summicron 50mm pre-asph lens. 

That decision means that I remain committed to what some call vintage photography that many understand in terms of being wrapped up in nostalgia. Though not born into a digital world, but subsequently embracing it, I accept that I am  a nostalgic photographer whose optimistic  belief in the digital future is becoming outmoded.  What then is analogue nostalgia? 

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This  photo of an old log in the bushland in Waitpinga on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia was made in 2021 when I was on an early morning walking with  Kayla.  We spent a lot of time in the bushland, mostly in the early morning, throughout 2021 and  the winter of 2022. Sadly we had to put Kayla down this week, as she had cancer of the lymph nodes.   

This is a memory of our times together in the local bushland; a memory of  nature as  transience: 

During our times together in the local bushland I recovered a conception of nature as transience--conceptualizing the bushland in terms of change, passing away, perishing-- and not just as shapes and colours as in a modernist aesthetics. 

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The  photo below  is of a branch of a tree on the  side of a  backcountry road in Waitpinga on the Fleurieu Peninsula.  I often walk down this road or both the early morning and the afternoon poodlewalks. The road  runs alongside  some bushland,  which is where we wander around after walking along the length of the road. We usually wander through the bushland back to our starting point. 

The photo was  made in low light on an early morning poodlewalk.  

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 My Leica M film rangefinder is locked in the past. I bought the analogue rangefinder  on the basis of craftsmanship in the 1970s when it was already  being marginalised  by the innovative, Japanese SLR cameras. In 2022 the film M is technologically  obsolete but it works.  

 I am no True Believer in Leica, its  myths or seductive mystique.  What I currently have  is a well made, vintage  film camera with a minimalist industrial design that requires a considered approach to photographing the world around me.   

 This picture was made in 2021 when I was starting to photographically  explore   the Spring Mount Conservation Park in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia.

Spring Mount  is a local stringybark conservation park in the ranges that run alongside the Inman Valley. It  lies  between, and separates,  the Hindmarsh Tiers and  the  Inman Valley.  

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The two  pictures below was made whilst I was on a poodlewalk in my local coastal area along  the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. They were  both made  with a 1970s handheld Leica rangefinder with Kodak Portra 400  ASA film. Its  bare bones  photography. The film  was then processed in a commercial lab and the negatives were  scanned to create a digital file (jpeg).  

This classical and hybrid approach to the photographic  is in marked contrast to the AI and computation that has entered the aesthetic realm in the second decade of the 20th century.  Aesthetic machines such as Midjourney's Discord server  can generate images that appear to be human made.  This  AI imaging is a machine-learning system, and it's  software enables you to create images that look like photographs, oil paintings, cartoons, etc. You can leave your expensive  camera in the cupboard. 

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