From the archives. 

The photos below are of the trunk of a river gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) that were  made around  the same time as this photo. It was an early experiment, using slow b+w film with a hand held film Leica M rangefinder, to explore a different approach to Leica M photography. 

The experiment was to try to move away from the Leica reportage/street photography  tradition; a tradition that is deemed to be the very heart and soul of what photography is. The move away  approach follows the pathway that   Heidegger carved out with  Being and Time, which is  to start from the  assumption that photography always has a site in history from which it inevitably inherits a past that is ‘more or less explicitly grasped’. 

There is a traditional tendency in photography  to adopt the concepts inherited from the past unthinkingly and as self-evident and the Leica  tradition of street photography was a hardened one that can  be loosened up, and the concealments that it has brought about can  be dissolved.  

This 'twisting free' approach  is not a negation of the past as it is concerned to explore whether or not  there was an alternative to Leica's  reportage/street photography  tradition?  Could  the film Leica M rangefinder be used in a different way to its foundational heritage of street photography? If  so, would this 'unconcealment' open up a space of possibilities that could be fruitfully explored photographically? 

 What then is concealed by the tradition of  street photography tradition?  It blocks off the possibility of other ways of photography. Can we retrieve what is forgotten and hidden -- eg., photographic abstraction or  photography as poiesis?

The Heideggerian pathway indicated that  this unconcealment could be done by stepping back to the more or less hidden sources of the photographic tradition itself. that is before the origins of the Leica M street photography tradition. A stepping back to  Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's earliest surviving camera photograph, circa 1826: View from the Window at Le Gras (Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France).This stepping back to photography's mimetic presuppositions is coupled to a  step forwards; that is the  photographic past from out of which we think is re-appropriated and interpreted anew.

Going  back to photography's  own presuppositions veiled by street  photography is in preparation for an overcoming, a self-overcoming (not a discarding) of the tradition of street  photography. 

The emphasis of the experiment was on natural being . A river gum in the reserve oppose the studio at Encounter Bay which  had been grown  from a seedling in  Arkaroola in the Vulkathunha – Gammon Ranges  in northern South Australia.The space that was opened up was the being or presence  of the tree as a moment in time.  Time in some sense ‘consists’ of the past, present and future. Shortly after the photo was made  the tree started to  die and its bark eventually fell off.  

So the approach is to rethink  photographic  ontology ‘more originally than’ that of the  street photography tradition in order to  uncover a different way of photography -- the possibilities, re-appropriation and rehabilitation of another photography.  This process brings forth  or opens up what a Leica  poetics (poietic) may be in late modernity dominated by abstract  forms of  knowledge  and impersonal social institutions -- the  universal law, scientific rationalism, free market economics and governmental bureaucracy that emerged with industrial  capitalism. This was the world long gone  that the Leica M rangefinder and its street photography tradition was a part of.  

 What then is poiesis that is uncovered by the twisting free and  the stepping back to the more or less hidden mimetic sources of the Leica street photography tradition?