Thoughtfactory: Leica poetics

Leica, film, snaps, chronicles, cliches

early morning light

This picture was made early in the morning  whilst walking along Baum Rd in Waitpinga on a poodlewalk with Kayla.

It is  a freeze-frame  of a transient moment   in early spring  that was with a handheld  Leica  M4-P rangefinder and Kodak Portra 400 ASA film.  The picture is an exploration of visual poetics.

 Traditionally understood  visual poetics is associated with poetry--it is deemed to be the visual in – or as – poetry. This has been considered in numerous ways. Links between poetry and visual art may take the form of ekphrasis – writing about an existing artwork. Likewise, illustration of poetic texts is as old as writing itself. Imagism initiated a preoccupation that informs virtually all of twentieth-century American poetry, insisting on the importance of concrete (most often visual) language. Further, collaboration between artists and poets supplies another lens through which to “see” the visual in relation to poetry. 

These  approaches often retain the traditiona). l split between visual imagery on the one hand and symbolic language on the other: we assume that all language (printed, digitized, or spoken) is not a visual medium but a symbolic order, whose content references meaning rather than embodying it. 

This idea of the closed boundaries between the different art forms. can be traced back to Gotthold Lessing's Laocoon  An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry ((1766). Under modernism, according to a strict formalist critique, both  text and images  were assigned certain realms which they were best suited to depict based on their semiotic strengths and weaknesses, and were effectively barred from attempting to cross or circumscribe those boundaries.

The  picture of the branch, as a detail of the landscape,  would be normally be  seen both as background to the human figures and  as the natural. What is overlooked is how did the natural  become the natural. This roadside vegetation  is criss crossed by narratives and it becomes a political landscape---due to the relationship between landscape and power.  Power expressed in the form of the site settlers dispossessing the Ramindjeri  from their land. 

So  words and images interact with and reinforce each other, and that there is no such thing as a pure medium.