Thoughtfactory: Leica poetics

Leica, film, snaps, chronicles, cliches

Posts for Tag: landscape

Sedan landscape

This picture was made whilst I was on a phototrip for the Mallee Routes project.  I stayed at Tanunda with the people walking  the Lavender Trail and travelled into the Murray Mallee each day. This road trip  was a little break from working on the aesthetic essay for the  Adelaide Art Photographers 1970-2000  book for Moon Arrow Press. 

I spent a lot of time driving across  to the Murray mallee on the eastern side of theRiver Murray, as well as  between Cambria and Sedan. I was trying to trace the old railway line from Sedan to Cambria. This is the railway siding at Sedan:  

 I read somewhere on my iPhone on the trip that camera sales  keep on shrinking or that the industry is in  transition, even though people are increasingly relying on imaging for stories in their  daily life.   The smartphone  with its touch screen has disrupted and transformed the entire photographic industry.  The iPhone vs Google Pixel vs Samsung is a  marketing battle,  much of which  centres on the camera, in-camera processing  and  computational photography. One consequence of this  disruption is   that entry-level APS-C style cameras (point and shoot) are  on their  way out.  That shifts the emphasis  to  the higher end or top shelf  full frame market. 

White Island, New Zealand

I visited Whakaari/White Island  in the Bay of Plenty,  prior to attending Photobook/NZ  in Wellington in 2018. 

Suzanne and I were on a weeks holiday in the North Island,  which included exploring the GeoThermal Highway.  White Island was where we started the exploration. After the holiday  Suzanne then went on to  walk the Grand Traverse  in the South Island,  whilst I stayed in an Air BnB in  the Te Aro Valley  in  Wellington. I spend the  week walking  and photographing around the city for the Reconnections project.    

I could only go to White Island in a party  organised by the local  tourist operators at Whakatane.  I was lucky to make  it to island,   due to a cyclone that had swept across this part of the island a couple of weeks earlier.  It   flooded  the Whakatane River,  littered the mouth of the river  with  the trunks and branches  of trees upstream,  and made the swells around the island too dangerous  for the boats to  land. 

Mallee landscape

A Mallee landscape near Mantung, in South Australia.

 This was made whilst on a photo camp in Loxton in 2017

The snapshot tradition

The pictures made with the film Leica are snapshots and, and as such, they belong to the tradition of the snapshot image culture. Traditionally, snapshot photography is  one in which the images  are almost always produced for and circulated within,  the private realm, and its meaning and significance are  imbedded in individual and rarely rational affective responses. 

The snapshot  tradition has been interpreted as a form of vernacular photography,  and  this culture  is usually interpreted as  pictures made by everyday  folk about their everyday life;  or more specifically,   "the unself-conscious efforts of common people . . . to create satisfying patterns in the realities of everyday life. 

This results in a gap between the unruly vernacular culture and the modernist,  hermeticizing discourse  of the art institution, with its emphasis on autonomy, authorship, uniqueness and universality.   

 This vernacular culture insists on lived experience, or a rhetoric of authenticity, works within specific social and cultural conventions, and emphasises personal narrative. For most of us, snapshots mean something because they preserve a memory, capture a moment, or depict a friend, family member or loved one. -These are the  same themes that Kodak promoted for decades. From a personal point of view the significance of snapshot aesthetics often revolves around what we see and feel when viewing snapshots, rather than what they mean to art historians, curators, and collectors.  

Tullah, Tasmania

The picture below   is an  archival image from the time when I'd just  picked up  film photography again after a 20 year break.  The image was made whilst Suzanne and I were travelling in Tasmania on a holiday  with our standards poodles (Agtet and Ari) in the 1st decade of the 21st century---it was  in late 2006 judging from these  posts on my old Junk for Code blog. 

This was our first trip to Tasmania,  and we were travelling down on the west coast of Tasmania at the time.  There'd been a fire in the hills in the hills around  Tullah,  Lake Rosebery and the MacIntosh Dam.  So I took some photos.  I was rusty judging from the fact that most of the  black and white negatives  from this trip were badly underexposed. 

The camera I was using then was  my old  Leica M4 with an old  Summicron 50mm lens and Tri-X film. The picture  was made  before I'd shifted to using colour film and  Mac computers.  The film was developed  and scanned by a pro lab and it was scanned as a jpeg--a low res scan.   

I didn't know what a  low res scan meant then. I knew nothing about the shift to digital that had been taking place in photography since the 1990s.  I 'd just picked up from where I'd left  photography  20 years earlier- I  was more or less naively starting over again  but without a wet darkroom.  

summer light

This picture of roadside vegetation  was made whilst  I was walking along  a back country road in Waitpinga, on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. It was in the late  summer in 2016 and  I was on an early morning   poodlewalk  with the standard poodles. 

I was forcing myself to take photos of trees and the agricultural landscape around me so as  to keep my  photographic eye hand in. This was the area/locality  in which I now live,  so how can I photograph it? I recall that I didn't have the confidence to  set things up to  do tripod based photography. 

Though film has quickly gone  poof (poor Kodak) as the medium of choice   for photographers,  I am part of that 'bridge generation' between film and digital. Digital, including rangefinder digital,   is simply easier, faster and immediate since the camera  is really a portable computer (with a sets of options,) and a sensor and  lens.   My technique is far slower and more measured with film.  

My doubts  about 35mm film photography are beginning to ease.  I can see that there is still some life in 35mm film photography,  in that  it has a different quality to the digital version.  But it is only for some subject matter, as I'm beginning to discover.  Unfortunately, I cannot predict which one.  

That  filmic quality is hard to pinpoint,  but it  has something along the lines of  providing a more emotional response to what is photographed, as distinct from a technically perfect image that can be quite bland.   Digital images are  unfilm like and so perfect that camera software manufacturers are now adding  adding "grain" enhancement plugins. 

seafog

A rarely experienced moment during the summer months on the southern coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula near Waitpinga- dense sea fog:

It  happened  for a couple of days. It would roll in across the landscape  in  the late afternoon.  Then it disappeared. 

photographic poetics at the Cotter River

This picture was made whilst I was on a photo trip to the Cotter River when I was in Canberra in mid-2015 whilst on a photoshoot with Judith Crispin:

It was here that I became away that it is  not about the accuracy of  representation  of the optical designs (the way that Leica choose to stay ahead of the competition and carve out a profile of excellence for their image).   Its a move away from   the metaphor of the lens is something we see with (a focusing or fiteringinstrrument), rather than something we look at to being  about the poetics of the situation in the here and now of  making a photo. 

That situation is a junction of acting forces and is in flux, is dynamic, and full of energy.  The poetics is a representation of the intensity and immediacy of our experience of that local moment in the context of the history of  that habitat. 

in the Ballan forest

This image was made in  the Ballan forest, Victoria,  Australia whilst on a photoshoot with Jason Blake and Judith Crispin during the Ballarat International Foto Biennale in 2015.

This photoshoot took place  late in the afternoon, the clouds were coming over  and the light was fading on the floor of the forest. We didn't have that much time to do more than walk around with handheld camera's. All of us had Leica M rangefinders that were loaded with film: colour for me, black and white for Jason and Judith.  

We had arrived at the location  without much time for photography as  it had  taken us quite a while to find the forest that Judith had explored when she was at  Ballarat International Foto Biennale in 2013.  

Judith and Jason then left for Melbourne  (Judith needed to see her publisher for her book on poety and Jason and to return to work). I went back  to the forest the next afternoon with my   Linhof Technika IV   5x4 field camera. I managed to expose  some large format film  before  the light faded and the rain swept in. Then it was a drive back to Adelaide.