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.