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.  

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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.

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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. 

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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.    

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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.     

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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. 

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A colleague vey  kindly donated me some 35mm rolls of expired Fuji Velvia 50 transparency  film amongst a bundle of various other kinds of film for me  to use. The rationale was that it was better to use them than leave them sitting in the freezer.  Fuji had stopped producing Velvia 50 in the 1st decade of the 21st century, so the film is quite old. 

 I  played around  or experimented with one roll once I realised that the E6  process was still available  in Adelaide.( But for how long I wondered).   I noted in the earlier  post that my images didn't pop with intense  color and vibrance. Many were  just flat and dull.  However, the occasional one turned out to be quite  interesting, such as this  one: 

The processed film's magenta cast works with these coastal  rocks  near Petrel Cove, as they  occasionally have an orange tint in certain  kinds of lighting situations.  It  did take  me a while though  to  come to terms with the odd /strange/quality, as the "unrealness"  wasn't what I'd expected from habitually using a digital camera.  

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I don't recall the exact occasion when I made this b+w abstraction of the trunk of a humble and ordinary tree in remnant bushland.  I remember  the location though.  I was walking in the local Waitpinga bushland on a poodlewalk with Kayla and it was an intuitive rather than a planned photo. 

I also remember that it  was  made after  I'd started  reading  Matsuo Bashō, the great haiku  poet  (1644–1694), whose self-image  of a recluse/wayfarer  and eccentric was the basis for  the  poetic possibilities in his Oku no hosomichi (The narrow road to the deep north, 1689). I was  reading him in preperation for going on a Basho walking tour  in 2023.     

The time  of the photo would have been sometime during  2023 and so  probably  after  this  post, which was  when  I was  wondering  whether it was worthwhile  to re-start photographing  with 35mm b+w film. 

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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  

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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.  

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