This picture or representation of quartz was made whilst I was on a coastal poodlewalk in Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia with Maleko, our standard poodle,  in the late afternoon. It was made around the same time as this image which is on the same 35mm roll of colour negative film.

 If it was overcast in the afternoon we would often wander  amongst these rocks on the  poodlewalks,  as the afternoon light is behind us and the soft light brings out the muted and subtle colours of  the rocks and quartz. 

This representational image of quartz is deemed to be a document created using a  transparent medium to produce an image that is readily intelligible. Hence it is a cliche that needed to be subverted by opening up the photographic process to explore the  possibilities of the photographic mediation of the world. That rejection of photographic transparency is the perspective of art history's account of the history of photography and it highlights how the logic of  20th century modernism is a culture of negation.   

The insurance money  to replace the Summicron 50mm f2.0 lens that could not be repaired has come through.  I have yet to hear back from Leica in Germany  with respect to how long  they will need to repair the salt damaged Leica M4-P.  I continue to struggle with my decision to  spend  $A1800 to repair  the  M4-P body. Buyer's remorse. 

I keep on telling myself  that I really should just let 35mm colour film  go instead of hanging on the way that I am. Film is expensive  to buy and to process;   I am not convinced about the unique quality of 35mm  film;  I do not think fiim is more antic,  and  digital is sharper, has more dynamic range, more colour and  more latitude for editing.  This eclipse of film by digital suggests that spending  money on repairing a film camera is not a good decision. 

I  justified my decision reason to repair the Leica by observing that I could recoup the money. A second hand M4-P black  body currently costs between $A2,600 to $A3,000 on e-Bay. A second hand M6, which is an M4-P with an inbuilt light meter,  is  between $5,200-$5,800. The new M6 is $A8,390 and, despite this hefty price,  there is a 9 months waiting list on pre-orders.  Something is currently going on with the resurgence of  film. Or is it a bubble that will soon burst  as people return to digital after spending recent years living in the film world?  

Update

These considerations re film/digital though important in a photographic culture are not significant,  since the interpretation of the representation of the quartz as transparent situates the image within the art world with  its own history, rationality and ongoing conversation about art's role in the modern world. 

 Thus the  image below is a shift to abstraction without embracing the modernist idea of art's necessary evolution to abstraction (as non-representation) through a rejection of representation;  the American modernist idea that the meaning of a photograph was located in the artist's subjectivity; or the American transcendental interpretation of the European Bauhaus. 

There is a large middle ground between the documentary and abstract readings of the image's quartz subject.  Could we not say that one of the after effects or traces of modernism today is contemporary photography's  increasing self-consciousness of  the importance of the legacy of conceptual and minimalist art?

Conceptual art can be understood as  the product of a series of ‘negations’  of the material object, the artistic medium, (good) visual form and established modes of artistic autonomy. Taken together these ideas tend to underpin aesthetic conceptions of art, particularly its modernist Greenberg form, and so conceptual art can be interpreted as a critique of Greenberg's formalist modernism and the way that it buried the conceptuality of the art work. It can also  be interpreted in its Art and Language form of the 1980s and 1990s as opening up a space in which  the privileged status of photographic practice within contemporary art is established. 

The critical legacy of conceptual art is that art is both conceptual and the formal qualities of the material art object;  art is an ontologically site of autonomous production of  meaning  with  a distinct kind of truth; and  art's authority and critical function continues to be  a problem within contemporary culture.  

The  film/digital conversation  in  photographic culture is very minor one in the context of a historically informed post-conceptual  art.