This picture was made in March 2018 when I was walking Wellington in New Zealand for a week or so. This was just prior to my return to Wellington to attend Photobook/NZ:
Like everyone else I hung out in Cuba St, often for a number of hours. I would usually walk up and down the street each time I wandered down to the CBD or the waterfront from the Air BnB studio apartment in Te Aro Valley. It was one of the more interesting streets in Wellington.
This was made whilst I was on a photocamp at Morgan in South Australia's Riverland in November. The camp was for the Mallee Routes project and I was there with Gilbert Roe, a fellow collaborator on the project.
This is the introduction to the book.
The impact of digital technology on photography was initially seen in the 1990s as a threat to, and a undermining of, the practical tradition of visual representation of the photographic. This was usually expressed in terms of the death of photography, the loss of the real, and the emergence of the post-photographic age.
This kind of understanding signified both a sense of the displacement of photographic practice by the use of digital technology and a sense of epochal change in our visual culture. Digital imagery meant new ways of seeing based on a freedom from the inherent constraints of automatism and realism that tied the analogue photographer to being a mere recorder of reality--a mirror held up to the world. The duality between the photography and the digital image is stark and it is understood in terms of technological means of production.
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.