The previous post finished by asking:'  What then is poiesis that is uncovered by the twisting free and  the stepping back to the more or less hidden sources of the Leica street photography tradition?'

The  stepping back in the post was to a birth certificate of photography, namely   Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's earliest surviving camera photograph, circa 1826: View from the Window at Le Gras (Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France). It is a stepping back to photography's own mimetic presuppositions in preparation for an overcoming; a self-overcoming of photography  itself. This stepping back to is coupled to a  step forwards; that is the  photographic past from out of which we think is  re-appropriated and interpreted anew. It is re-interpreting the original  photographic presuppositions  as other to  the street photography tradition's   interpretations of the birth certificate of photography. 

The other that is uncovered is photography as poetics or poiesis. What then is poiesis?

The influential interpretation -- that of Benjamin mimetic faculty and behaviour and  Adorno's  adapation and assimilation to others  ---  is poiesis is mimesis with Adorno giving a historical account of the development of the various meanings  of mimesis that is counterpoised to, and been repressed by,  instrumental reason through the historical civilising process.  With Heidegger poiesis stands  opposed to the calculative constructions of technological enflaming in which being is reduced to a standing reserve or a resource ordered and controlled by the modern techno-sciences.This is an ontological reduction of things to their utility  and nature to a resource.     

 This reflection on the poetic (or poietic, to use the Greek term)  refers to Aristotle's conception of poiesis as making or producing things and the conception of artistic creation and  craftwork that is oriented to the horizon of production. The process of making is definite: it has a definite beginning: the blue print of the product. It has a definite end: the completion of the product. For Aristotle, the end of poiesis is beyond poiesis itself since the finished product is always for someone and something, for the use to which it can be put.  

When the artisan produces an artifact, he or she constantly, though only peripherally, keeps in sight the model towards which working on the material aims. the artist projects an image of the thing, i.e. its intended look, before the thing worked upon comes to embody this image. The product, insofar as it eventually fulfills this intention, becomes a likeness,  imitation, or representation of this projected model.  In classical Greek ontology ( Plato-Aristote) orientations  to a mimetic notion of poiesis. 

Hence poiesis as mimesis  

Mimesis, however, is more complex than the conventional interpretation of it as  imitation, or simply mirroring reality.  The creative, poietic, qualities of literature or other art forms have been connected to mimesis.  This foregrounds the  conception of mimesis as the creation of independent artistic world of its own (heterocosm). Hence the dual aspect of mimesis-- world-reflecting and world-making. Poiesis is the  world-creating activity.

So the Leica M street photography tradition works within the  world reflecting aspect of mimesis whilst the Leica poetics works within the world-creating activity of mimesis or  poesis.   Heidegger, in his return to the pre-Socratics,  breaks away from the production model , to interpret poesis as ontological disclosure or the un-concealment of beings out of concealment. Art has the power to disclose the emergence of an entity into presence, its self-blossoming into the space of unconcealment. 

It opens up a world and shapes the way we understand  ourselves in that world.