This photo  book started out as  a Leica blog  of  the pictures that I'd taken with my Leica rangefinder--- a M4-P.   The blog form means that its roots are internet based.  In contemporary visual art, Internet-based art forms have for the most part remained in a media art ghetto with little exposure within the system of contemporary art biennials and contemporary art centers. 

I'd  primarily used the Leica M4-P  with a Leica Summicron 50mm f2.0 rigid lens.  Most of the early work with the camera was done using black and white  film (Kodak Tri- X) which I developed myself in a wet darkroom with chemicals.  

The Leica M system is seen as a reportage camera,  rather than a  versatile all-round camera, but the  tight integration of body and lens ensured  good performance, and  Leica's  focus was on simplicity of use and on basic photographic functions helped define the snapshot style of picture taking.  

Photography now means digital photography. Continual change  in digital technology and shortening of product cycles  is the rule,  and  Leica has responded by  shifting from  an engineering to a luxury company with  most of its new products now  positioned in the luxury class. In this  they follow the design rulebook of Apple. 

I gave up  film photography  when I was doing a PhD  at Flinders University of South Australia in the 1990s  and whilst I was  working in Canberra. Towards the end of the Canberra gig  I slowly came back to  digital photography to build a life after politics.  I started using the  M-system  with colour film,  which was processed and scanned by a pro-lab, with the  pictures uploaded to Flickr and a photoblog which are then  viewed on a computer screen. This digital  workflow is different to the experience of classical  film  photography, and it indicates  how  the Internet has changed the way we understand photography.

I am time-capsuled into the 1980s  when I  make a picture  in a digital world with the M4-P loaded with a Kodak Portra ISO 400   film. This is seen as a hanging onto the past,  given the emergence of the combined technologies of autofocus, zoom lenses,  and digital capture and processing,  and  the smart-phone's  dominance in  the  world of image making and reportage.  The smartphone is the snapshot camera of today, and it combines three important elements : the making, processing, and distribution of images.  The iPhone may well become the digital equivalent of the old Leica M film camera. 

The use of smart phone as an image device ensures the continuance of the equation of the amateur snapshot with the cliché---it represents a symbol of the lowest common denominator, an emblem of the boring, the repetitive, and the formulaic. It also represents a device for remembering. 

Digital technology has changed the workflow of photography  and image creation, and it  may also have changed the meaning of what photography  is.  Photographers work  with cameras, computers,  internet connections and online archives. The  Internet has  created  the potential for  diverse  forms of photographic publication, exhibition and distribution,  and it is this that differentiates 2015 from the 1950s-70s. Photography in 2015 is multimedia journals, website galleries,  photo books, and thriving online social media communities,  and  it is an integral part of a networked society based around  mobility, ubiquity, and connection.   

What hasn't changed though is the social and economic conditions of late modernity that have given rise to the decay or deformity  of ethical life that makes it difficult to live rightly. An enlightened  scientific rationality has delegitimized traditional moral norms and values, making their pursuance increasingly irrational and without appeal. It is not rational to bind oneself to outmoded (fictional, mythological, irrational) norms and values in the social world of late capitalism. 

The major institutions of society have been rationalised in accordance with the mechanisms of capital reproduction  and  the norms of  the market's instrumental rationality --efficiency, calculability, standardisation. These social and institutions are no longer available as spheres of ethical practice (the good life) in late modernity.   

If these constitute the conditions of our ethical practices and the subjective expression of ethical life in late modernity, then the ethical has retreated into forms of practice associated with private existence. Private existence has become a refuge for ethical life apart from the demands of the capitalist economy.