Thoughtfactory: Leica poetics

Leica, film, snaps, chronicles, cliches

cuttlefish shell + Leica clones

The picture below is from a morning walk along the coastal rocks  in the  littoral  zone of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula ---probably the platform of rocks just after  Dep's Beach: 

I have been reading about the history of the modern 35mm system camera as a result of some  experiments using  a 1960  Zeiss-Ikon Contaflex Super (SLR)  and some expired 35mm Fuji Velvia 50 that had been gifted to me.  I knew next to nothing about Zeiss-Ikon, only that Zeiss today make high quality lenses, and so I wanted to learn about what happened to the German camera industry before Japanese innovation swept all before them,  what had been lost and what is now absent.  

Representatlon: bark and light in Waitpinga #2

This is a companion post to this previous one

That post explored the photographer being immersed in the bushland rather than separate from it. It asked the question: 'can the idea of  photography as poetics  provide a different conception of truth to the  indexical  correspondent one, which is  the traditional understanding of truth in photography.'

The photo can  disclose a moment in the bushland. Photography as poiesis is a mode of disclosure  (aletheia) of being. Discloses in the sense of opens up or unconceals. In doing so the photo is  both a poetics and is thoughtful.

Representatlon: bark and light in Waitpinga

The picture  below is a representation of a landscape detail that was made  whilst  I wandering  in the Waitpinga bushland in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula on a poodlewalk with Maleko. At the time  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. 

Bunyip Chasm rock pool

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.   

at Gassan Shizu, Honshu, Japan

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. 

form in chaos

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 photo above is an attempt  to  evoke, or disclose,   the  presence  of  the tangled and chaotic Waitpinga bushland of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia.  What is disclosed is the emergence of an entity in the natural world into presence -- into a space of unconcealment-- from what has been concealed. This presence is not stable as it is constantly moving or undergoing change over time.   

photography as poiesis

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.  

tradition, abstraction, being

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.

Solway Reserve bark

From the archives: 

I came across these  pieces of fallen bark  lying on the ground in the reserve at Solway Crescent, which  was just across  the road  from the studio at Encounter Bay. The  bark  was from a lemon scented gum (Corymbia citriodora) that had been planted by  Suzanne's mother in the late 1970s when her parents retired to Encounter Bay in Victor Harbor  from Melbourne. 

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. 

at Wilsons Promontory + memories

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.