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
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.
I purchased my silver Leica M4 rangefinder in Melbourne in the late 1970s. It quickly became my walk around camera and I became very comfortable with a rangefinder as opposed to the then popular and more versatile single lens reflex film cameras. Unfortunately, the Leica's rangefinder was damaged when it fell to the ground in Brisbane around 2011. The camera strap broke and the camera hit the concrete floor with a thud. I then lost it for around 10 years or so.
It was found in 2021 and in early 2022 I sent it to Leica in Germany to have the rangefinder repaired and the camera serviced. I then bought a second hand, modern Summicron-M 35mm f/2 lens.
Despite being made in the 1960s this 60 year camera now looks and works as if it were new. I could see why it's classically minimal, industrial design or aesthetic would appeal to collectors; and why it has a much higher monetary value today than a contemporary digital camera. (The Leica's value keeps on increasing).
I started photographing with the unmetered Leica M4 using black and white film in a very modest way this year --the M6 was the first metered M rangefinder (manufactured between 1984 to 2003). I made photos using Ilford HP 5 Plus film whilst I was on the various poodlewalks in the local bushland. This one of bark along Depledge Rd in Waitpinga is one of the early photos that I made:
This is a photo of a section of a tin wall in Myers Lane in Adelaide's CBD.
This wall was just opposite where I used to live in the city, which was in the process of change during the shift from an industrial to a postindustrial or information capitalism. Our image culture changes into a digital culture with this shift. This was a time of rapid technological change, due to the emergence of digital technologies, such as the computer, the mobile phone, the internet as a information superhighway, computer generated imagery, video surveillance in the shopping mall and the high tech Desert Storm of the Gulf War.
This is a photography of appearances, of the look of things, the ephemeral, the particular. It is an older way of seeing that is being dislodged by the post-photographic tendency in a digital culture to devalue and deny the representation of appearances and sight in favour of the emancipation of the image from its empirical moorings.