I have 5 rolls of 35mm colour  film that were exposed before the Leica M4-P was damaged by  saltwater and  sent back to the Leica factory in Germany to be repaired. That was  in December 2022. It now increasingly looks increasingly likely that the rangefinder  won't be repaired before I go walking in Japan in October. 

 3 of those 5 rolls were processed a while ago and I  scanned them over the weekend.  It's a slow process and whilst doing so I realised  just how much  I enjoyed the process of using an  analogue  Leica rangefinder to make a picture.  I miss the analogue process as techne --- the working of materials by a craft person who knows effective ways to use  the camera equipment to make good moves in the design space. This conception of the work of art as  techne is quite different to  the Romantic and modernist idea of creativity as a product of individual will, subjectivity, imagination. 

The realization  about techne was a kind of awakening or interruption to the flow or naturalised continuum of the myth making and  the beautiful semblance of digital photography.     

The interruption  was  not analogue nostalgia in a digital world, or a conservative romanticising of what has gone and been lost.    I realized  when  I was scanning the negatives that I  liked the look of film. Digital is  a much superior technological but film, with all  its limitations,  has its own  materiality and appearance. It   is also much more unpredictable than digital. So technological progress is not linear. There is a discontinuity here. In this  discontinuity or interruption  the idea of techne emerges. 

Techne is not just the rangefinder camera (the tool) as the  material process of making the image also includes the historically accumulated and socially instituted know-how--eg., the craft skills associated with analogue photography. The power to use the camera   sklllfully is the power within this know-how that is inscribed in and as the practice of already trained  photographers. At this level of the tradition of skilled practice  there is no sharp line to be drawn between art and craft, as the artist, like the highly skilled craftsman, draws on a tradition of practical know-how built over long periods in domains within a culture.

Techne  includes both poiesis (to make) and praxis (deliberative action).