The repaired Leica M4-P has returned, a  Summicron 50mm lens was acquired whilst I was walking  in Japan,  and some very expensive  Portra 400 ASA colour film has been ordered from B+H in New York.  We are back in business after the camera  has been out of use for a year.   It's good to be back as I missed using an analogue rangefinder and colour film to explore the nature of photographic poetics.

 In that year of layoff I have been thinking that using a machine  as a way of situated  sense making  is different from the act of drawing as a tracing, a copy,  a  representation in the realm of appearances related to, and dependent on, the presence of  real being -- eg., an ideal form as in Platonism.    The machine sees differently -- both in  excess of what is intended by the photographer and what is hidden from the photographer's eye.      

A seascape from 2022: 

During that layoff time I have been reflecting  how much the culture of photography had been shaped by that of the  natural sciences in modernity. The latter's  emphasis was on mathematical  precision: being objective,  clear,  precise, exact and truthful in order to gain  knowledge about how things in the world worked. Hence photography as documenting the world, its objects and ourselves. 

Poetics is contrary to this since a poetic image puts poetry before objective reason and   is about  the  sensuous appearance of things.  So the image  has been traditionally seen as misleading, fuzzy and ambiguous, which is what was needed to be avoided to achieve the certainty of objective knowledge.     

In pre-modernity Aristotle linked the image to memory with a  imagination being a productive filter between sense perception and thought. The pictorial legacy of  the humanist rhetorical tradition reinforced images as modes of memorialisation that originate in human need to mitigate  the experience of loss  and the breakdown of our forms of attachment to people and place. This tradition  was pushed into the background by the culture of modern mathematical science.

It  re-emerged in the Baroque - less  a seventeenth-century art historical phenomenon of style (1600 and 1750)  and more  as a visual field in which there is no privileged viewpoint.  Leibniz's ontology is one that sees an uninterrupted flow in the way matter, as unfolding substance, and mind as a further fold of nature, are intimately intertwined. Change in natural processes is an unfolding process of gradual permutation that never reaches completion with the embodied  perception of the present as an intersection of past and future states.  This process  ontology of folds  is the basis of the poetic sensibility of an analogue photographic image. 

Another seascape from 2022:

  In the temporal flow in nature  there is receding, vacant space that points to the missing and blurred context that always surrounds any given, complex  state. This allows us to integrate  temporality and change into our mimetic understanding of nature (eg., seascapes) and our memory,  and to see below the surface of things to uncover the past and the future history of an object poetically encrypted on its surface. 

This hermeneutical approach to the world is one of labyrinths,  fleeting meanings,  unsignified  excess, and embodied  perception of  poetic narratives in the folded processes of the natural world.  What is opened up by the visual  framing of the visible is an infinite plurality of embodied perspectives. 

Wth the emergence of digital  technology analogue photography is now defined  as  traditional photography that is gradually becoming irrelevant in the twenty-first century.  Digital photography is a paradigmatic shift  given its different ontology -- a computational one.  Digital images are data structures, a computer simulation of traditional photography -- ie.,  digital imaging imitates the cultural codes of film photography (and cinema). It's  clinical appearance  and precision is more akin to the culture of mathematics and science.