The picture below was made on the A32 somewhere near Peterbourough. The landscape----the cliche is that of a desolate and austere country with an empty centre--- is seen through the window of the car travelling towards Adelaide. In this part of the South Australian landscape the pastoral lands were becoming farmland. Wind farms in the mid-north of the state would soon appear.
The word from Canberra was that mining iron ore was Australia's future and that the mining boom was eternal. Cornucopia was Australia's destiny. Big Mining ruled the country and it's rule represented the triumph of global neo-liberalism.
Despite making the shift to digital technology to make snapshots I decided to keep using the rangefinder film Leica. I was unsure of what photography was for; how it works to engage the viewer's interest and passion; what kind of work it performs upon the viewer; or how something in the image calls for a response.
The reasons are primarily technological ones. Digital cameras are more unserviceable or to expensive to repair if and when the spare parts are available. The lifetime of a digital Leica camera has not yet been established, but my M4-P body and lens has a working life between 50 and 75 years with very modest service. The reason is that spare parts are easy to find and any competent repair person can service this type of camera. Digital camera bodies are dumped as obsolete.
The cost-of-ownership of a modern digital Leica camera is quite high, but owners point to zero cost for the pictures themselves. However, the rate of depreciation of a new digital Leica camera--and pro DSLR's---is also quite high, and the chance of a major defect is also much greater than it was in the past with the mechanical Leica cameras.
I was at a photographic crossroads. Does the classical rangefinder photographer still exist I wondered? In the mid-twentieth century, photographers, equipped with high quality, portable Leica cameras began to photograph and exhibit everyday life—in the streets, on the road, in private settings—in a realist style, using black and white film. They--Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand--- produced images that seemed random, accidental, and caught on the fly. But today?
If classical rangefinder photographers still exist, are they akin to people who still listen to vinyl records in a world of streaming music? Personal momentos? A kind of folk art? Or are they working--striving for pictorial innovation--- in a fine art context creating snapshots as Outsider art?
What was very noticeable was how the the codes and conventions of modernist snapshot photography had been appropriated by the advertising industry's snapshot aesthetics. This appropriation and co-option had transformed the humble snapshot into a powerful strategic tool in which visual images capitalizing on historical conventions within photography and realism helped to construct brand identity in a postmodern world.
These images embodied dualities: spontaneous yet composed; authentic yet constructed; naive yet sophisticated. In emphasising visual simplicity and the fundamental emotional bonds between photographer and subject.
Snapshot aesthetics is a mode of image-making that is constructed precisely to seem unconstructed and manufactured to be read as spontaneous.