I don't recall when I made this b+w abstraction.
I know the location though. I was walking in the local Waitpinga bushland on a poodlewalk with Kayla. It was an intuitive rather than a planned photo.
I don't recall when I made this b+w abstraction.
I know the location though. I was walking in the local Waitpinga bushland on a poodlewalk with Kayla. It was an intuitive rather than a planned photo.
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
Throughout the winter of 2023 I would often spend an hour or so wandering through the local Waitpinga bushland with Kayla on an early morning poodlewalk. I'd be walking in the bushland just after sunrise, and whilst walking I started a bark series with the Leica M4-P. It would be one camera, one lens, one film and it would centre on the ontology of the object in the present moment. The bark is so mundane, that if we encounter it in everyday life, we would barely register it.
There are some earlier photos that preceded this series as a conscious walking art project, and they can be interpreted as pointing to what was to become. These early photos can be viewed here and here and here. Oh, and here. They emerged from drifting --from becoming lost in the bushland, being responsive to chance and to circumstance, and privileging the reactivity of the walk itself.
It is a low key walking art series, which explores the ephemera of the mundane bark peeling off the trunks and branches of the pink gums; or the piles of bark lying on the ground. The transience of the bark, its decay and disintegration (ie., perishability) is one of the more recognisable aspects of the flux, or the constant change in the bushland apart from the occasional fallen tree. It was slow walking whilst keeping an eye out for foxes, kangaroos, and rabbits so I could prevent Kayla from chasing them.
The series as a walking art project is premised on a meditative walking and seeing (of being in the ephemeral present) and on the photography being simple. It is underpinned by Japanese aesthetics, with its minimalist approach and complex and sophisticated categories with multiple interpretations (eg., wabi-wabi). It is a modest, walking art project that is contrary, or offside to, the currently fashionable photographic approach to make hero mages that celebrates the photographer's vision.
The pictures in this post come from a short experiment using an expired roll of Velvia 50 color transparency film to check if the Leica M4-P rangefinder and lens were working ok. The pictures show that both Leica's repairs to, and renovation of, the salt water damaged M4-P body plus the second hand 50mm Summicron lens that I had purchased whilst in Tokyo, are working perfectly. Great.
I did this quick experiment whilst I was waiting for the 35mm Kodak Portra 400 ASA film order from B+H in New York to arrive. The roll of expired Fujifilm's Velvia 50 had been gifted by a friend. It had been frozen for around 10-15 years.Thanks to this gift the only expense for me to check out the renovated rangefinder would the cost for the lab to process the roll of Velvia 50.
I knew nothing about Velvia before the experiment. Subsequent research informed me that it was created in the early 1990s [when it was known as Velvia (RVP)] and that it was subsequently rejigged/redesigned by Fuji in 2007. It is now known as Velvia 50 (RVP 50). My expired 36 roll of film was Velvia 50 -- the current version. I have never used this transparency film, but a quick search indicated that those who have used it love it for its vividness and brilliance.
I was was curious about Velvia 50 in the sense of wondering what kind of poetic images could result, if any. How different would the seascapes be from the seascapes using Kodak Portra 400 ASA? So I just made some snapshots whilst I was on the daily poodlewalks.
I was taken back when I picked up the processed film from the lab in Adelaide as most of the pictures on the expired 36 roll of Velvia 50 were underexposed. The images looked as if I didn't bother to meter, even though I was careful metering. They also had a strong magenta hue. Post processing the scans was basically a salvaging task to obtain some reasonable pictures. I was able to get the odd one to come out ok.
An example is the above pictures of light and clouds over Encounter Bay in the early morning before sunrise with the off-colour saturation and high contrast.They look suitably dramatic and suggest poetic possibilities associated with the vibrant colours of the early morning pre-sunrise and/or stormy winter conditions.
I have found that an appealing aspect of using the renovated Leica M4-P film camera after a year of being without it is its operational simplicity, especially when compared to the complex menus of the current mirrorless, full frame digital cameras. The film rangefinder's mechanics are so basic that the camera forces you to photograph differently.
The M4-P rangefinder was made before Leica included a light meter in its film rangefinders and the limits of film are quickly reached in low light situations. So it is not an all round camera like the latest full frame mirrorless digital cameras -- such as the sophisticated Sony A7 RV, the Nikon Z8 or the Canon EOS R5.
Within these limits the usability of the rangefinder centres on image making that is slow placed and premised on the characteristics of the film and the limitations of the rangefinder camera.
Due to the cost of 35m colour negative film (Kodak Portra 400 ASA) these days the 'in camera' image making has to be slow and considered by necessity. You are forced to slow down, evaluate what you are seeing, and then think about constructing the image as a poetics.
The repaired Leica M4-P has returned, a Summicron 50mm lens was acquired whilst I was walking in Japan, and some very expensive Portra 400 ASA colour film has been ordered from B+H in New York. We are back in business after the camera has been out of use for a year. It's good to be back as I missed using an analogue rangefinder and colour film to explore the nature of photographic poetics.
In that year of layoff I have been thinking that using a machine as a way of situated sense making is different from the act of drawing as a tracing, a copy, a representation in the realm of appearances related to, and dependent on, the presence of real being -- eg., an ideal form as in Platonism. The machine sees differently -- both in excess of what is intended by the photographer and what is hidden from the photographer's eye.
A seascape from 2022:
During that layoff time I have been reflecting how much the culture of photography had been shaped by that of the natural sciences in modernity. The latter's emphasis was on mathematical precision: being objective, clear, precise, exact and truthful in order to gain knowledge about how things in the world worked. Hence photography as documenting the world, its objects and ourselves.
Poetics is contrary to this since a poetic image puts poetry before objective reason and is about the sensuous appearance of things. So the image has been traditionally seen as misleading, fuzzy and ambiguous, which is what was needed to be avoided to achieve the certainty of objective knowledge.
Leica Australia have just informed me that the camera body of the salt water damaged M4-P rangefinder (circa 1980s) has been repaired and that it is on the way from Wetzlar in Germany to Sydney, Australia. Sadly, the Leica 50mm Summicron f.2 lens is unrepairable as was the basic Sekonic light meter (a Sekonic L-308 S) that I'd been using. I need to buy another 50mm Summicron and, unfortunately for me, these lenses aren't cheap, even the second hand ones. So it won't be going with me to Japan in October.
I have missed not using the M4-P (one camera one lens) the last 10 months that it has been in Germany. I found the simplicity of the camera (one body, one prime lens) so appealing. The simplicity of the rangefinder is that it reduces the gap between meditative seeing and the camera's sight. It is a shift towards becoming one with the camera.
I made the above photo in the winter of 2022. It is from one of the 5 rolls of 400 ASA Portra that I'd exposed prior to the M4-P becoming badly damaged. It was the late afternoon winter light that caught my eye as I was walking along one of the various paths in the bushland that were made by the kangaroos with Kayla.
I have 5 rolls of 35mm colour film that were exposed before the Leica M4-P was damaged by saltwater and sent back to the Leica factory in Germany to be repaired. That was in December 2022. It now increasingly looks increasingly likely that the rangefinder won't be repaired before I go walking in Japan in October.
3 of those 5 rolls were processed a while ago and I scanned them over the weekend. It's a slow process and whilst doing so I realised just how much I enjoyed the process of using an analogue Leica rangefinder to make a picture. I miss the analogue process as techne --- the working of materials by a craft person who knows effective ways to use the camera equipment to make good moves in the design space. This conception of the work of art as techne is quite different to the Romantic and modernist idea of creativity as a product of individual will, subjectivity, imagination.
The realization about techne was a kind of awakening or interruption to the flow or naturalised continuum of the myth making and the beautiful semblance of digital photography.
The interruption was not analogue nostalgia in a digital world, or a conservative romanticising of what has gone and been lost. I realized when I was scanning the negatives that I liked the look of film. Digital is a much superior technological but film, with all its limitations, has its own materiality and appearance. It is also much more unpredictable than digital. So technological progress is not linear. There is a discontinuity here. In this discontinuity or interruption the idea of techne emerges.
My salt water damaged Leica M4-P is still at the Leica factory in Germany, either being repaired or still in the queue waiting to be repaired. I have no idea which it is. Leica did advise that it would be repaired and returned to Australia at the end of June. It is now more than eight months. The repair times have blown out, but not to worry. The camera's value is increasing all the time -- it would be in mint condition and so worth around $A4000 dollars. Unfortunately, I need to replace the Summicron 50mm f2 lens as Leica advised me that my 1980s damaged Summicron lens was unrepairable. Sad, as it was a good lens.
In the meantime I am going through the archives. The two pictures below are from 2020 and they are details of the ground in the beech forest along the Kepler Track, near the shores of Lake Manapouri in the Fiordland National Park in the South Island of New Zealand.
There were heaps of people walking the track that day. I was only doing a days walk as Suzanne had decided to go on a day trip to Doubtful Sound / Patea. This beech forest was an all green world, and it was such a contrast to an arid South Australia which has no forests. he photos were made around the same time as this picture.
We were staying at Lake Manapouri at the time. The news was all about the emerging Covid-19 pandermic. We had started to worry about whether we would need to cut short our holiday and return to Australia early. We were closely monitoring the news for any policy hints about Australia closing its borders. We did not want to be stranded in NZ if Australia did close its borders.
This hand held picture was made of some roadside vegetation whilst I was walking down a country road in Waitpinga on an early morning poodlewalk with Kayla in the late winter of 2022.
This was a low light situation as we were walking along the road around sunrise to avoid the traffic. The above picture of a tree trunk was made around the same time as the bark abstracts I'd shown on an earlier post on Leica Poetics.