This picture was made whilst I was on a photo trip to the Cotter River when I was in Canberra in mid-2015 whilst on a photoshoot with Judith Crispin:

It was here that I became away that it is  not about the accuracy of  representation  of the optical designs (the way that Leica choose to stay ahead of the competition and carve out a profile of excellence for their image).   Its a move away from   the metaphor of the lens is something we see with (a focusing or fiteringinstrrument), rather than something we look at to being  about the poetics of the situation in the here and now of  making a photo. 

That situation is a junction of acting forces and is in flux, is dynamic, and full of energy.  The poetics is a representation of the intensity and immediacy of our experience of that local moment in the context of the history of  that habitat. 

This is not the domain of dreamy poets since poetics is a part of the everyday language of photography in that form is key element of meaning and ordinary photographers show a keen interest in visual form. They are right to do so since how  you say something in a photo  and what you say in it are not easily separable.

 This is what is missed by the dominant view of photography as just a form of communication,   the notion of language as information exchange, a drab model of encoding and decoding with no time for frills such as exploration of the expressive resources of a visual language.

It's no longer a case of the photo making you feel that you were there or picturing the scene before your eyes---ie., holding up a mirror to nature.   It is more the case of expressing those emotional experiences which are not fully explicable in rational abstract terms. The Romantics held that in art  the world of sense  has been transformed imaginatively,  and by the action of the human passions so as to yield us a world fit to live in; and this is the world the poets deal with. 

Art is a product of the imagination: the imagination ceases to function as a mirror reflecting some external reality and becomes a lamp which projects its own internally generated light onto things. The lamp-function of imagination, as epitomized in Romanticism, is one where imagination is employed not to perceive the actual world but rather to produce virtual worlds of its own. In this case the lens is used in order to project an image outwards.

Photography as poetics  combines features of both the `reproductive' aspect of the mirror (imagination as mimetic) and the `productive' aspect of the lamp (imagination as creative).  Imagination is what allows us to see something as meaningful that is, filled with meaning, having significance rather than sheer randomness. Like the mirror, the lens performs a mimetic task, reproducing in an organized gestalt whatever aspect of reality we are apprehending. But like the Romantics' lamp, the lens also performs a `creative' task, forming the raw material of intuition into meaningful shapes or coherent patterns that we can recognise.

The creative task is akin to the florist arranging flowers in an elegant case, concerned with the arrangement of forms and their potential impact to cause a response in viewers.