From the archives.
The bark abstracture below is from the first roll of b+w 35mm film I'd exposed on my return to black and white photography with the recently renovated Leica M4 rangefinder. I'd bought the 35mm Ilford Pan F Plus by mistake -- I'd meant to buy a roll of 400 ASA film -- and so I was stuck with a 36 roll of slow film.
The experiment did show me that I could make fragmentary photos at f2 and that they were okay. This opened up a pathway of photographing in low light which I then started to explore. Eventually that pathway lead to the idea of photography as poetics as opposed to street photography or reportage and to a photography of fragments, of the superficial and transitory
The texts by the Germans (Simmel, Benjamin, Kracauer) on the emerging metropolis in modernity (ie., Paris, Berlin) in the early twentieth century highlighted that the fragmentary and the transient is how individuals actually experience the new in urban modernity in the everyday life of the metropolis. In Baudelaire's conception of modernity the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent is set in opposition to the eternal, the immutable, and he then tasks the painter of modern life, of modernity, as distilling the eternal from the transitory.
If urban modernity is this distinctive mode of experiencing social reality as seeking society and the social relations within it as (temporally) transitory and (spatially) fleeting, then this implies, conversely, that the traditional, permanent structures are now absent from human experiences of urban modernity. Reality in modernity is experienced as permanent flux and so photography commences with fragments of reality and the individual experience of a fragmentary and transitory reality
In relation to Baudelaire’ Marx held that though the phantasmagoria of the world of commodities is a world in motion, in flux, in which all values are transitory and relations are fleeting and indifferent, this transitory world of commodities goes together with the constant reproduction of the relations of capitalism.
Georg Simmel held that the key to the contemporary representation of modernity is the diverse ‘momentary images’ or ‘snapshots’ of modern social life that are to be viewed sub specie aeternitatis--namely understanding the universal or the necessary significance of phenomena, abstracted from their transient, mundane everyday contexts.
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