The picture below is a representation of a landscape detail was made whilst I wandering in the Waitpinga bushland in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula on a poodlewalk with Maleko. I was exploring the possibilities of b+w poetics:
It would have been in the late afternoon during the winter months as I do not walk in the bushland with the standard poodles in spring or summer in the afternoon because of the Eastern brown snake, which are venomous.
The picture below is of a small rock pool near Bunyip Chasm in the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges in South Australia. We were staying in a hut for a week or so there in 2021. This particular rock pool was at the beginning of the gorge.
Just further on a large and deep rock pool between the gorge's steep cliffs prevented us from going any further into the gorge and on past the water falls. We just didn't have the time to bypass or go round this rock pool by climbing up the cliffs to reach the chasm itself.
The photo below was made in the early morning at Gassan Shizu Hot Springs at Nishikawa in the Yamagata Prefecture. We had just spent the last week or so on a Basho walking tour in the Tohoku region in Honshu, Japan. The tour had started in Sendai and Gassan Shizu was the last morning of the fascinating l Basho walk
Mt. Gassan, one of the three sacred mountains of Dewa Sanzan is in the background. The other two sacred mountains are Mt Yudono and Mt Haguro, which had visited prior to our overnight stay at Gassan Shizu.
Shortly after I'd made the above photo the tour was taken by the hotel bus to Yamagata Station where we went our separate ways. We travelled by Shinkansen to Tokyo then on to Osaka to begin walking the Kumano Kodo pilgrim trail, self-guided.
The well known fragment 123 of Heraclitus reads: "Nature loves to hide itself'.
The Australian bush can be quite messy, dense and chaotic and quite difficult to walk in and to photograph. Often there are no pathways through the thicket and you have to go around it.
The previous post finished by asking:' What then is poiesis that is uncovered by the twisting free and the stepping back to the more or less hidden sources of the Leica street photography tradition?'
The stepping back in the post was to a birth certificate of photography, namely Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's earliest surviving camera photograph, circa 1826: View from the Window at Le Gras (Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France). It is a stepping back to photography's own mimetic presuppositions in preparation for an overcoming; a self-overcoming of photography itself. This stepping back to is coupled to a step forwards; that is the photographic past from out of which we think is re-appropriated and interpreted anew. It is re-interpreting the original photographic presuppositions as other to the street photography tradition's interpretations of the birth certificate of photography.
The other that is uncovered is photography as poetics or poiesis. What then is poiesis?
The influential interpretation -- that of Benjamin mimetic faculty and behaviour and Adorno's adapation and assimilation to others --- is poiesis is mimesis with Adorno giving a historical account of the development of the various meanings of mimesis that is counterpoised to, and been repressed by, instrumental reason through the historical civilising process. With Heidegger poiesis stands opposed to the calculative constructions of technological enflaming in which being is reduced to a standing reserve or a resource ordered and controlled by the modern techno-sciences.This is an ontological reduction of things to their utility and nature to a resource.
This reflection on the poetic (or poietic, to use the Greek term) refers to Aristotle's conception of poiesis as making or producing things and the conception of artistic creation and craftwork that is oriented to the horizon of production. The process of making is definite: it has a definite beginning: the blue print of the product. It has a definite end: the completion of the product. For Aristotle, the end of poiesis is beyond poiesis itself since the finished product is always for someone and something, for the use to which it can be put.
From the archives.
The photos below are of the trunk of a river gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) that were made around the same time as this photo. It was an early experiment, using slow b+w film with a hand held film Leica M rangefinder, to explore a different approach to Leica M photography.
The experiment was to try to move away from the Leica reportage/street photography tradition; a tradition that is deemed to be the very heart and soul of what photography is. The move away approach follows the pathway that Heidegger carved out with Being and Time, which is to start from the assumption that photography always has a site in history from which it inevitably inherits a past that is ‘more or less explicitly grasped’.
There is a traditional tendency in photography to adopt the concepts inherited from the past unthinkingly and as self-evident and the Leica tradition of street photography was a hardened one that can be loosened up, and the concealments that it has brought about can be dissolved.
This 'twisting free' approach is not a negation of the past as it is concerned to explore whether or not there was an alternative to Leica's reportage/street photography tradition? Could the film Leica M rangefinder be used in a different way to its foundational heritage of street photography? If so, would this 'unconcealment' open up a space of possibilities that could be fruitfully explored photographically?
What then is concealed by the tradition of street photography tradition? It blocks off the possibility of other ways of photography. Can we retrieve what is forgotten and hidden -- eg., photographic abstraction or photography as poiesis?
The Heideggerian pathway indicated that this unconcealment could be done by stepping back to the more or less hidden sources of the photographic tradition itself. that is before the origins of the Leica M street photography tradition. A stepping back to Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's earliest surviving camera photograph, circa 1826: View from the Window at Le Gras (Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France).This stepping back to photography's mimetic presuppositions is coupled to a step forwards; that is the photographic past from out of which we think is re-appropriated and interpreted anew.
From the archives:
The reserve was originally stripped bare farmland apart from 3 isolated pine trees straddled across a small creek bed. The original farmland has been sold and is covered in houses. The reserve It is now fully treed and the birds have returned.
In the summer of 2023 I spent a week walking in Wilsons Promontory in Victoria with the Retire Active Bush Walking Group ( ARPA). It was their summer camp. The solo walk that I did on the day off from the group walks was to revisit the western foreshore/littoral zone of the Corner Inlet Marine and Coastal Park.
The walk along this coastline was return visit. I'd explored it some 15 or more years earlier, and I was reconnecting with some fragmentary memories from that time. I vaguely remember this was part of a road trip to Mallacoota.
Remember the industrial world of film or analogue photography from yesteryear? It wasn't that long ago. The grey haired ones, if they are still active, were encultured in it. Since it was yesteryear we can look back at it.
In the early and mid-twentieth century -- probably up to the late 1970s or early 1980s in Australia --- we understood photography in a specific way. We carefully shot the scene, ensuring our originality, then culled carefully down the accumulated photos on the contact sheet to the best Images. We were carefully taught to examine a contact sheet and pick out "the good ones" and circle them with a red pen.
What were the good ones? Those that represented the Truth (an objective representation of the way things really are) or expressed significant form. We then carefully printed the good ones on paper in the chemical darkroom making sure that what was eventually produced was the fine print.
The photograph was a carefully made singular object, to be revered and inspected closely. It was fitted into that Enlightenment, linear, mechanized, system of being centred around progress. The idea was that it showed us Truth (though significant Form) about the nature of things. We were informed that we should accordingly inspect the picture carefully (or at least pretend to) and give it the respect it is due with a close reading. Only a few could make being a photographer. The art galleries and university departments adhered to modernist values—the authority of the artist, the expertise of the curator and the discourse of the modern as the new,
That world has long gone. In the 21st century digital photography is our current world. We are in a new era of photography that is shaped by the internet, social media and the smart phone. This is an image world of fleeting, fragmentary impressions, instant likes, pretentious Influencers and persuasive hucksters offering the real deal. Social media, the internet and their computational mode of production transform a marginalized film photography's precarious existence into something other than what it once was -- the internet transforms it into a networked image that is viewed on a screen. The analogue photo is a hybrid as it is shaped by an algorithmic logic, is treated no differently to a digital image, and it is no longer culturally significant how the image was produced.
I have just re-discovered the low-tech Leicaphilia blog of Timothy Vanderweert and his personal writing about film and digital photography. , what Vanderweert I learned that Vanderweert died in July 2023 from cancer, but thankfully, his wife has kept his Wordpress blog online so we can still read it. Leicaphilia's combination of image and text that reminds us yet again of how few are the blogs by photographers that interweave good photographs and insightful writing about photography and are in it for the long haul.
A number of Vanderweert posts on Leicaphilia are concerned with various experiments to compare digital black and white photos to those made with fast and grainy b+w film, such as Kodak Tri-X films and various digital attempts to emulate the Tri-X film look or emulate an HP5 negative. I personally think that is going down a rabbit hole. Why try to make digital look like film for though these are the same (photography) they are also different. The uses of photographs are different, the cultural impacts are different, the way they're made is different. Why not accept the differences between the film and digital technologies and the historical differences between the two eras/centuries and get on with digital photography?
The industrial world that film photography was a part of is long gone. That means turning away from the legacy ecosystem, then accepting and working with what Vanderweert characterises as the transparent, ultra-lucidity of digital files, their noiseless purity, lack of grain and what some see as a certain lack of presence or sterility. We have a new, albeit flawed photography.
No doubt, the technology of a digital B&W photography will improve as the resources of the industry are applied to overcoming that plastic look too often seen with digital B&W files. Eventually, the resources will pay off with an appealing graduated tonality emerging in digital B&W photography.
Reading Vanderweert's blog made me wonder if there were any other similar Leica blogs on the internet, that is ones involving writing about photography. Unfortunately, there are no links on the legacy Leicaphilia blog for me to follow up. It is very much a stand alone blog. The similar blogs, if they existed, probably have come and gone --- 99 per cent of new blogs die within their first year, primarily due to their failure to attract a significant number of readers. Even Still Searching, that was backed by Fotomuseum Winterthur, has packed it in.