I was on my way to Canberra. It was early in the morning and I was  driving through the Murraylands  heading towards  Wellington  to catch the ferry  across the River Murray. The days journey was  to go to Talem Bend, travel  the Mallee Highway, and have an overnight stop at Hay in NSW. I was  hoping to take some photos of the exposed roots of the redgums along the Murrumbidgee for the Edgelands project. 

I was travelling alongside  Lake Alexandrina and it was the light and the colours that caught my eye.  So I  made a cliched 'on the road' photo with my decades old one lens/one camera. It is photography with a rangefinder camera. A spontaneous snapshot with its  trace of the real.  

Whilst making the photo I realised that the Leica rangefinder film camera is basically a relic  in a world of automation and algorithms; in a world where photography is now produced through a mathematical set of rules that work autonomously, without human interference and which are self-correcting. You press the button and the program takes over to produce a data set cheaply and easily.  Perfection.

A current view is that though  the  technology is different, the photographer’s eye remains the same.   The photographer’s eye refers to a way of seeing and so  to  John Szarkowski's 1966  book, The Photographer's Eye: A Way of Seeing  that was seen as an introduction to the visual language of photography.  In it he argues that photography is fundamentally different from other picture-making processes in that it is based on selection rather than synthesis – the photographer takes elements of the real world for his picture, whereas the painter makes the elements of his picture from scratch. 

This is part of a broader  argument for the place of photography as an art-form and defining the unique characteristics that differentiate it from other visual art-forms such as painting. His essay is an exposition of the Modernist idea of medium specificity applied to photography. The modernist assumption here is  that what defines an art-form are the specific characteristics of the medium itself rather than, for example, the  field of photography and  the purposes and uses to which the medium is put. 

 Consequently, art photography’s achievements are based largely on an aesthetic of the photographic – meaning that there are distinct inherent properties of the medium itself that give it value as an art-form, and the skilled practitioner can employ these properties in order to produce expressive work. The assumption here is that art photography functions as an expression of the photographer’s interior, a vehicle for his/her thoughts, feelings and so on. Art photography defined itself in opposition to the commercial applications of photography (e.g. advertising) and snapshots.  

Why snapshots? Because snapshots are assumed to involve the repudiation of subjectivity and self-expression and involve remembrance for others.  Modernist photography, in contrast,  effectively ignored the role of the beholder, was complete in and of itself, and  functioned as a direct vehicle for the aesthetic concerns of the artist. It is what Michael Fried  has called an anti-theatrical tradition the visual arts that sought to produce art which denied the presence of a beholder by producing work that portrayed people in states of absorption – turned away from the viewer and engrossed in some activity that demands their complete attention. 

Snapshot photography relies largely on the viewer constructing meaning for themselves when beholding the photograph, rather than it being a medium that carries intentionality on the part of the creator.