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.
]]>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.
]]>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:
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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
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
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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:
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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