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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From the archives. 

The photos below are of the trunk of a river gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) that were  made around  the same time as this photo. It was an early experiment, using slow b+w film with a hand held film Leica M rangefinder, to explore a different approach to Leica M photography. 

The experiment was to try to move away from the Leica reportage/street photography  tradition; a tradition that is deemed to be the very heart and soul of what photography is. The move away  approach follows the pathway that   Heidegger carved out with  Being and Time, which is  to start from the  assumption that photography always has a site in history from which it inevitably inherits a past that is ‘more or less explicitly grasped’. 

There is a traditional tendency in photography  to adopt the concepts inherited from the past unthinkingly and as self-evident and the Leica  tradition of street photography was a hardened one that can  be loosened up, and the concealments that it has brought about can  be dissolved.  

This 'twisting free' approach  is not a negation of the past as it is concerned to explore whether or not  there was an alternative to Leica's  reportage/street photography  tradition?  Could  the film Leica M rangefinder be used in a different way to its foundational heritage of street photography? If  so, would this 'unconcealment' open up a space of possibilities that could be fruitfully explored photographically? 

 What then is concealed by the tradition of  street photography tradition?  It blocks off the possibility of other ways of photography. Can we retrieve what is forgotten and hidden -- eg., photographic abstraction or  photography as poiesis?

The Heideggerian pathway indicated that  this unconcealment could be done by stepping back to the more or less hidden sources of the photographic tradition itself. that is before the origins of the Leica M street photography tradition. A stepping back to  Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's earliest surviving camera photograph, circa 1826: View from the Window at Le Gras (Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France).This stepping back to photography's mimetic presuppositions is coupled to a  step forwards; that is the  photographic past from out of which we think is re-appropriated and interpreted anew.

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From the archives: 

The reserve was originally stripped bare  farmland apart from 3 isolated pine trees straddled across  a small creek bed. The original farmland has been sold and is covered in houses. The reserve It is now fully treed and  the birds have returned. 

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In the summer of  2023  I spent a week walking in Wilsons Promontory in Victoria with the Retire Active Bush Walking Group ( ARPA).  It was their summer camp. The solo walk that  I did on the day off from the group walks was to revisit the western foreshore/littoral zone  of the Corner Inlet Marine and Coastal Park. 

The walk along   this coastline was return visit.   I'd explored  it   some 15 or more years  earlier,  and I was  reconnecting with  some fragmentary memories  from that time. I vaguely remember this  was  part of a road trip to Mallacoota.    

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Remember the industrial world of film or analogue photography from yesteryear?  It wasn't that long ago. The grey haired ones, if they are still active,  were encultured  in it.  Since it was yesteryear we can look back at it. 

 In the early and  mid-twentieth century -- probably up to the late 1970s or early 1980s in Australia ---  we understood photography in a specific way. We carefully shot the scene, ensuring our originality, then  culled carefully down the accumulated photos on the contact sheet  to the best Images. We were  carefully taught  to examine a contact sheet and pick out "the good ones" and circle them with a red pen. 

What were the good ones? Those that represented the Truth  (an objective representation of the way things really are) or expressed significant form. We then  carefully printed the good ones  on paper in the chemical darkroom making sure that what was eventually produced was the fine print. 

The photograph was a carefully made singular object, to be revered and inspected closely. It was fitted into that Enlightenment, linear, mechanized, system of being centred around progress.  The idea was that it showed us Truth (though significant  Form) about the nature of things.  We were informed that we should accordingly inspect the picture carefully (or at least pretend to) and give it the respect it is due with a close reading. Only a few could make being a photographer. The art galleries and university departments adhered to modernist values—the authority of the artist, the expertise of the curator and the discourse of the modern as the new, 

That world has long gone. In the 21st century digital photography is our current world. We are in a new era of photography that is shaped by the internet,  social media and the smart phone. This  is an image world of fleeting, fragmentary  impressions,  instant likes,  pretentious Influencers and persuasive hucksters offering the real deal.  Social media, the internet  and  their  computational mode of production  transform a marginalized film photography's  precarious existence into something other than what it once was -- the  internet  transforms it into a networked image that is viewed on a screen.  The analogue photo is a hybrid as it is shaped by an algorithmic logic,  is  treated no differently to a digital image,  and it is no longer culturally significant  how the image was produced.     

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I have just re-discovered  the low-tech  Leicaphilia blog of  Timothy Vanderweert and his personal writing about film and digital photography. , what Vanderweert I learned  that  Vanderweert died in July 2023 from cancer, but  thankfully,  his wife has kept his Wordpress blog online so we can still read it.  Leicaphilia's combination of image and text that reminds us  yet  again of  how few are the blogs by photographers that interweave good photographs and insightful writing about photography and are in it for the long haul.  

A number of Vanderweert  posts on Leicaphilia are concerned with various  experiments to compare  digital black and white  photos  to those made with  fast and grainy b+w film, such as Kodak Tri-X films and  various digital attempts to emulate the  Tri-X  film look or  emulate an HP5 negative. I personally think that is going down a rabbit  hole.  Why try to make digital look like film for though these are  the same (photography)  they are also  different. The uses of photographs  are different, the cultural impacts are different, the way they're made is different.  Why not  accept the differences between the film and digital technologies and the historical differences between the two  eras/centuries and get on with digital photography?  

The industrial world that  film photography was a part of is long gone. That means turning away from the legacy ecosystem,  then accepting and working with what Vanderweert characterises as the transparent, ultra-lucidity of digital files, their noiseless purity, lack of grain  and  what some see as a  certain lack of presence or sterility.  We have a new,  albeit flawed photography.  

No doubt, the technology of  a digital B&W photography will improve as the  resources of the industry are applied to overcoming that plastic look too often seen with digital B&W files. Eventually,  the resources will  pay off  with  an appealing  graduated tonality  emerging in digital B&W photography.

Reading Vanderweert's  blog  made me wonder if there were any other similar Leica blogs on the internet, that is ones involving writing  about photography.  Unfortunately, there are no links on the legacy Leicaphilia blog for me to follow up.  It is very much a stand alone blog. The similar blogs, if they existed,  probably have come and gone --- 99 per cent of new blogs die within their first year,  primarily due to their  failure to attract a significant number of readers. Even Still Searching, that was backed by Fotomuseum Winterthur,  has packed it in. 

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A colleague vey  kindly donated me some 35mm rolls of expired Fuji Velvia 50 transparency  film amongst a bundle of various other kinds of film for me  to use. The rationale was that it was better to use them than leave them sitting in the freezer.  Fuji had stopped producing Velvia 50 in the 1st decade of the 21st century, so the film is quite old. 

 I  played around  or experimented with one roll once I realised that the E6  process was still available  in Adelaide.( But for how long I wondered).   I noted in the earlier  post that my images didn't pop with intense  color and vibrance. Many were  just flat and dull.  However, the occasional one turned out to be quite  interesting, such as this  one: 

The processed film's magenta cast works with these coastal  rocks  near Petrel Cove, as they  occasionally have an orange tint in certain  kinds of lighting situations.  It  did take  me a while though  to  come to terms with the odd /strange/quality, as the "unrealness"  wasn't what I'd expected from habitually using a digital camera.  

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I don't recall the exact occasion when I made this b+w abstraction of the trunk of a humble and ordinary tree in remnant bushland.  I remember  the location though.  I was walking in the local Waitpinga bushland on a poodlewalk with Kayla and it was an intuitive rather than a planned photo. 

I also remember that it  was  made after  I'd started  reading  Matsuo Bashō, the great haiku  poet  (1644–1694), whose self-image  of a recluse/wayfarer  and eccentric was the basis for  the  poetic possibilities in his Oku no hosomichi (The narrow road to the deep north, 1689). I was  reading him in preperation for going on a Basho walking tour  in 2023.     

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This is another picture in my little  experiment   in  a black and white poetics:

The picture  is of a small salt pan near Petrel Cove on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. It was made in the summer of 2023. The two earlier pictures in the experiment are here and here  

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Throughout the winter of 2023 I would often spend an hour or so wandering  through  the local Waitpinga bushland with Kayla on an early morning   poodlewalk.  I'd be walking in the bushland  just after sunrise,  and whilst walking  I started  a bark series with  the Leica M4-P. It would be one camera, one lens, one film and it would centre on the ontology of the object in the present moment.  The bark is so mundane, that if we encounter it in everyday life, we would barely register it.

There are some earlier photos  that preceded  this series as a conscious walking art  project,  and they can be interpreted as  pointing to what was to become. These early  photos  can be viewed   here and here  and here. Oh, and here.   They emerged from drifting --from becoming lost in the bushland, being  responsive to chance and to circumstance, and privileging  the reactivity of the walk itself.

It is a low key walking art series,  which  explores  the ephemera of the mundane  bark  peeling off the trunks and branches of the pink gums; or the piles of bark lying  on the ground. The transience of the  bark,   its decay and disintegration (ie., perishability) is one of the more recognisable aspects of  the  flux,  or  the constant change in  the  bushland apart from the occasional fallen tree. It was slow walking whilst keeping an eye out for foxes, kangaroos, and rabbits so I could prevent Kayla from chasing them.

The series as a walking art project is premised on a meditative walking and seeing (of being in the ephemeral present) and  on the photography  being simple.   It  is underpinned by Japanese aesthetics,  with its minimalist approach and  complex and sophisticated categories with multiple interpretations (eg., wabi-wabi).  It  is  a modest,  walking art project that is contrary, or offside to,  the currently fashionable photographic approach to make  hero mages that celebrates the photographer's vision.  

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The pictures in this post  come  from a short  experiment using an expired  roll of Velvia 50 color transparency film to check  if the Leica M4-P rangefinder  and lens were working ok. The pictures  show  that both  Leica's repairs to, and renovation of, the salt water damaged  M4-P body plus  the second hand 50mm Summicron lens that I had purchased  whilst in Tokyo,  are working perfectly. Great.

I did this quick experiment  whilst  I was waiting  for the 35mm Kodak  Portra  400 ASA  film order  from B+H in New York to arrive. The   roll of  expired Fujifilm's Velvia 50 had been gifted by a friend. It had been frozen for around 10-15 years.Thanks to this gift  the only expense for me to check out the renovated rangefinder would the cost for the lab to  process the roll of Velvia 50.      

I knew nothing about Velvia before the experiment.    Subsequent research informed me that it  was created in the early 1990s [when it was known as Velvia (RVP)]  and that it was subsequently rejigged/redesigned by Fuji  in 2007.  It is now known as  Velvia 50 (RVP 50). My  expired 36 roll of film  was Velvia 50 -- the current version.  I have never used this transparency  film,  but a quick search indicated that those who have used it love it for its vividness and brilliance.

I was  was curious about  Velvia 50  in the sense of wondering  what kind of poetic images could result,  if any. How different would the seascapes  be from the seascapes using Kodak Portra 400 ASA? So I just made some snapshots whilst I was on the daily poodlewalks. 

I was taken back when I picked up the processed  film from the lab in Adelaide   as most of the pictures on the expired 36 roll of Velvia 50 were underexposed.  The images looked as if I didn't bother to meter, even though I was careful metering. They also had a strong magenta hue. Post processing the scans  was basically  a salvaging task to obtain some  reasonable pictures.   I was able to get the odd one to come out ok. 

An example is  the above pictures of light and clouds  over Encounter Bay in the  early morning before sunrise with the  off-colour saturation and high contrast.They   look suitably dramatic and  suggest  poetic  possibilities associated with the vibrant colours of the early morning pre-sunrise and/or  stormy  winter conditions.

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I have found that an appealing aspect of using the renovated Leica M4-P film camera after a year of being without it   is its operational simplicity,  especially when compared to the complex menus of the current  mirrorless,  full frame digital cameras.  The film rangefinder's mechanics are so   basic that the camera  forces you to photograph differently.   

The M4-P rangefinder was made  before Leica   included a light meter  in its film rangefinders  and the limits of film are quickly reached in low light situations. So it is not an all round camera like the latest full frame mirrorless digital cameras -- such as the sophisticated Sony A7 RV,  the  Nikon  Z8  or the Canon EOS  R5.  

Within these limits the usability of the rangefinder centres on image making that is slow placed and premised on the characteristics of the  film and the limitations of the rangefinder  camera.   

Due to the cost of 35m colour negative film (Kodak Portra 400 ASA) these days the 'in camera' image making has to be  slow and considered by necessity.  You are forced to slow down, evaluate what you are seeing,   and  then think about constructing the  image as a poetics.  

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The repaired Leica M4-P has returned, a  Summicron 50mm lens was acquired whilst I was walking  in Japan,  and some very expensive  Portra 400 ASA colour film has been ordered from B+H in New York.  We are back in business after the camera  has been out of use for a year.   It's good to be back as I missed using an analogue rangefinder and colour film to explore the nature of photographic poetics.

 In that year of layoff I have been thinking that using a machine  as a way of situated  sense making  is different from the act of drawing as a tracing, a copy,  a  representation in the realm of appearances related to, and dependent on, the presence of  real being -- eg., an ideal form as in Platonism.    The machine sees differently -- both in  excess of what is intended by the photographer and what is hidden from the photographer's eye.      

A seascape from 2022: 

During that layoff time I have been reflecting  how much the culture of photography had been shaped by that of the  natural sciences in modernity. The latter's  emphasis was on mathematical  precision: being objective,  clear,  precise, exact and truthful in order to gain  knowledge about how things in the world worked. Hence photography as documenting the world, its objects and ourselves. 

Poetics is contrary to this since a poetic image puts poetry before objective reason and   is about  the  sensuous appearance of things.  So the image  has been traditionally seen as misleading, fuzzy and ambiguous, which is what was needed to be avoided to achieve the certainty of objective knowledge.     

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Leica Australia have just informed me that the camera body of the  salt water damaged  M4-P rangefinder (circa 1980s) has been repaired and that it is on the way from Wetzlar in Germany to Sydney, Australia.   Sadly, the Leica 50mm Summicron f.2  lens is unrepairable as was the basic Sekonic light meter (a Sekonic L-308 S) that  I'd been using.   I need to buy another 50mm Summicron and,  unfortunately  for me, these  lenses aren't cheap,  even the second hand ones. So it won't be going with me to Japan in October.  

I have missed not using the M4-P (one camera one lens) the last 10 months that it  has been in Germany.  I found the simplicity of the camera (one body, one prime lens) so appealing. The simplicity of the rangefinder is that it reduces the gap between meditative  seeing and the camera's sight. It is a shift towards becoming one with the camera.

I made the above photo  in  the winter of  2022.  It is from one of the 5 rolls of 400 ASA Portra that I'd exposed  prior to  the M4-P becoming  badly damaged. It was the late afternoon  winter light that caught my eye  as I was walking  along one of the various paths in the bushland that were  made by the kangaroos  with Kayla.   

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I have 5 rolls of 35mm colour  film that were exposed before the Leica M4-P was damaged by  saltwater and  sent back to the Leica factory in Germany to be repaired. That was  in December 2022. It now increasingly looks increasingly likely that the rangefinder  won't be repaired before I go walking in Japan in October. 

 3 of those 5 rolls were processed a while ago and I  scanned them over the weekend.  It's a slow process and whilst doing so I realised  just how much  I enjoyed the process of using an  analogue  Leica rangefinder to make a picture.  I miss the analogue process as techne --- the working of materials by a craft person who knows effective ways to use  the camera equipment to make good moves in the design space. This conception of the work of art as  techne is quite different to  the Romantic and modernist idea of creativity as a product of individual will, subjectivity, imagination. 

The realization  about techne was a kind of awakening or interruption to the flow or naturalised continuum of the myth making and  the beautiful semblance of digital photography.     

The interruption  was  not analogue nostalgia in a digital world, or a conservative romanticising of what has gone and been lost.    I realized  when  I was scanning the negatives that I  liked the look of film. Digital is  a much superior technological but film, with all  its limitations,  has its own  materiality and appearance. It   is also much more unpredictable than digital. So technological progress is not linear. There is a discontinuity here. In this  discontinuity or interruption  the idea of techne emerges. 

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My  salt water damaged Leica M4-P is still at the Leica factory in Germany,  either being repaired or still in the queue waiting to be repaired.  I have no idea which it is.  Leica did advise that it would  be repaired and returned to Australia at the end of June. It is now more than eight months. The repair times have blown out, but not to worry. The camera's  value is increasing all the time -- it would be in mint condition and  so worth around  $A4000 dollars. Unfortunately, I need to replace the Summicron 50mm f2 lens as Leica advised  me that my 1980s    damaged Summicron lens was unrepairable. Sad, as it was a good lens. 

In the meantime  I am going through the archives. The two pictures below are from 2020 and they  are details of the ground in the beech forest along  the Kepler Track,   near  the shores of Lake Manapouri in the Fiordland National Park in the South Island of New Zealand. 

There were heaps of people walking the track that day. I was only doing a days walk  as Suzanne had decided to go on a day trip  to Doubtful Sound / Patea.  This beech forest was an all green world,  and it was such a contrast to  an arid South Australia which has no forests.   he photos  were made around  the same time as this picture.

 We were staying at Lake Manapouri at the time. The news was all about the emerging Covid-19 pandermic. We  had started to worry  about whether we would need to cut short our holiday and return to Australia  early.    We were closely  monitoring  the news  for any  policy hints about  Australia closing its borders. We did not want to be stranded in NZ if Australia did close its borders.

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 This hand held  picture was made of some roadside vegetation whilst I was walking down a country road in Waitpinga on an  early morning poodlewalk with Kayla in the late winter of 2022. 

This  was a low light situation as we were walking along the road around  sunrise to avoid the traffic.  The above picture of a tree trunk was made around the same time as the bark abstracts  I'd shown on  an earlier post on Leica Poetics. 

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The third in the series of the  salt-water damaged  roll of  35mm film:  

I read in The Guardian that Wim Wenders now  regards photography as a thing of the past. His argument is this:

 “It’s not just the meaning of the image that has changed – the act of looking does not have the same meaning. Now, it’s about showing, sending and maybe remembering. It is no longer essentially about the image. The image for me was always linked to the idea of uniqueness, to a frame and to composition. You produced something that was, in itself, a singular moment. As such, it had a certain sacredness. That whole notion is gone.”

The modernist understanding of photography has gone to be replaced by the network image. 

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Since film is undergoing a nostalgic  resurgence --Pentax says it is planning  to make film cameras again-- I thought that I would post a  second  example from  the  salt-water damaged  roll of  35mm film. This  was in the Leica M4-P rangefinder when a rogue wave crashed over me,   soaking the camera and destroying the lens.  The camera  body is currently in the process of  being repaired by Leica in Wetzlar who have recently advised that it should be returned to Australia by the end of June.  

Here is the photo:  

It  is actually a more interesting photo of the wooden structure of the old Granite Island causeway  than  it would have been if the film  was  normal or non-damaged. What it shows is that it  is the materiality of film that opens up opportunities to  treat  the film differently   during the developmental process.  You can play around with the filmic material if you want to,  but  colour film is  now expensive. 

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In this earlier post I mentioned that in December 2022 my  Leica M4-P and the Summicron 50mm  lens was  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:

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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