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
Just when I'd decided to definitely give up using my venerable Leica M4-P and 35m colour film, and make the definite shift to the cutting technological edge of hand held digital imaging, up pops this image.
It is a simple and nondescript coastal bush growing along the railway line and the picture was made on one of my early morning poodle walks at Hayborough, Victor Harbor on the Fleurieu Peninsula. It is what is usually ignored or a disregarded aspects of the contemporary coastal landscape that would be seen as the "unphotographable" by many contemporary DSLR photographers.
What popped up is photography as poetics. Photography in a quiet voice.
Therein lies the strength of a film Leica ---whether colour or black and white---in today's digital world where the global trend is to product differentiation and short product cycles in which companies reduce costs by re-using as many components as possible. We have reached a point where different digital cameras and systems converge to the same level of performance, and the differences that exist are increasingly irrelevant for the average user. In this world it is the camera's features that become the crucial markers for the tech journalists ever on the lookout for the next big thing to write about.
Photography as poetics points to the mood, feeling and emotion that an image creates or produces. This is a revision of the classical Leica ethos of a camera designed to record daily events as a visual memory: thirty-six memories on one roll of film that are an honest and detailed record of the world.