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.     

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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.   

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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. 

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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.

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 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. 

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The third in the series of the  salt-water damaged  roll of  35mm film:  

I read in The Guardian that Wim Wenders now  regards photography as a thing of the past. His argument is this:

 “It’s not just the meaning of the image that has changed – the act of looking does not have the same meaning. Now, it’s about showing, sending and maybe remembering. It is no longer essentially about the image. The image for me was always linked to the idea of uniqueness, to a frame and to composition. You produced something that was, in itself, a singular moment. As such, it had a certain sacredness. That whole notion is gone.”

The modernist understanding of photography has gone to be replaced by the network image. 

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Since film is undergoing a nostalgic  resurgence --Pentax says it is planning  to make film cameras again-- I thought that I would post a  second  example from  the  salt-water damaged  roll of  35mm film. This  was in the Leica M4-P rangefinder when a rogue wave crashed over me,   soaking the camera and destroying the lens.  The camera  body is currently in the process of  being repaired by Leica in Wetzlar who have recently advised that it should be returned to Australia by the end of June.  

Here is the photo:  

It  is actually a more interesting photo of the wooden structure of the old Granite Island causeway  than  it would have been if the film  was  normal or non-damaged. What it shows is that it  is the materiality of film that opens up opportunities to  treat  the film differently   during the developmental process.  You can play around with the filmic material if you want to,  but  colour film is  now expensive. 

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In this earlier post I mentioned that in December 2022 my  Leica M4-P and the Summicron 50mm  lens was  damaged from a rogue wave surging over me whilst I was photographing on the rocks along the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. 

Leica advised that the lens was unrepairable but that  they could repair  the camera body. The rangefinder body is now with the Leica workshop in Wetzlar,  Germany and I've been advised that there is a 6 months wait for analogue camera repairs.  So I will  need to acquire  another 50mm lens. 

The film (Kodak Portra 400 ASA ) that was in the camera at the time of the salt-water accident was developed and I have recently scanned it. This is one frame:

My reaction was well,  now that is rather interesting, but it sure is an expensive way to achieve a different look to film. I do not recommend this kind of alternative processing. Could it be done by processing the negatives in saltwater? 

The photo  below was made on an early morning  poodlewalk with Kayla in 2022 in the local bushland in Waitpinga on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. The photo was made around the same time as this black and white one. 

Kayla and I did a lot of  our early morning walks in this particular  bushland,  as it was one of her favourite places to walk in. We would  come across  foxes, rabbits and  kangaroos in the winter/spring months and  so there were lots of scents for there.  She would wait whilst I photographed. On this occasion  I was attracted by the subtle colours of the bark and the leaves. 

This image  is produced by  a form of lens-based photography as distinct from the photographic.  Then former involves creating images using light,  a camera and film.  (Digital technology replaces film with a sensor.)   We need to make a distinction  between photography and the photographic  and to see them as two distinct entities,  given the emergence of AI-generated images. Our  photographic language has become a free floating entity separated from (lens-based ) photography and it now has a life of its own.

That is our starting point in the current situation.   

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From the 2020 archives and  a trip to NZ  pre the global Covid-19 pandemic. 

I didn't take many photos with the analogue Leica M-4 P rangefinder on this trip as  I was in the process of giving 35mm  film photography away. Digital photography was far better in low light situations  and Kodak colour negative film was becoming rather  expensive.  

The photo below is of trees on the banks of  the Waiau River  at Lake Manapouri in the Southland region of the South Island.

We were staying at Lake Manapouri at the time,  monitoring the pandemic situation and keeping an eye on whether  Australia would close  its borders.  We wondered if we would  be able to finish our trip. The Europeans that  we meet still thought that they could  keep on travelling between countries. The possibility of  Australia and New Zealand closing their borders was considered to be remote. 

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