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.

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From the archives: 

I came across these  pieces of fallen bark  lying on the ground in the reserve at Solway Crescent, which  was just across  the road  from the studio at Encounter Bay. The  bark  was from a lemon scented gum (Corymbia citriodora) that had been planted by  Suzanne's mother in the late 1970s when her parents retired to Encounter Bay in Victor Harbor  from Melbourne. 

The reserve was originally stripped bare  farmland apart from 3 isolated pine trees straddled across  a small creek bed. The original farmland has been sold and is covered in houses. The reserve It is now fully treed and  the birds have returned. 

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The pictures in this post  come  from a short  experiment using an expired  roll of Velvia 50 color transparency film to check  if the Leica M4-P rangefinder  and lens were working ok. The pictures  show  that both  Leica's repairs to, and renovation of, the salt water damaged  M4-P body plus  the second hand 50mm Summicron lens that I had purchased  whilst in Tokyo,  are working perfectly. Great.

I did this quick experiment  whilst  I was waiting  for the 35mm Kodak  Portra  400 ASA  film order  from B+H in New York to arrive. The   roll of  expired Fujifilm's Velvia 50 had been gifted by a friend. It had been frozen for around 10-15 years.Thanks to this gift  the only expense for me to check out the renovated rangefinder would the cost for the lab to  process the roll of Velvia 50.      

I knew nothing about Velvia before the experiment.    Subsequent research informed me that it  was created in the early 1990s [when it was known as Velvia (RVP)]  and that it was subsequently rejigged/redesigned by Fuji  in 2007.  It is now known as  Velvia 50 (RVP 50). My  expired 36 roll of film  was Velvia 50 -- the current version.  I have never used this transparency  film,  but a quick search indicated that those who have used it love it for its vividness and brilliance.

I was  was curious about  Velvia 50  in the sense of wondering  what kind of poetic images could result,  if any. How different would the seascapes  be from the seascapes using Kodak Portra 400 ASA? So I just made some snapshots whilst I was on the daily poodlewalks. 

I was taken back when I picked up the processed  film from the lab in Adelaide   as most of the pictures on the expired 36 roll of Velvia 50 were underexposed.  The images looked as if I didn't bother to meter, even though I was careful metering. They also had a strong magenta hue. Post processing the scans  was basically  a salvaging task to obtain some  reasonable pictures.   I was able to get the odd one to come out ok. 

An example is  the above pictures of light and clouds  over Encounter Bay in the  early morning before sunrise with the  off-colour saturation and high contrast.They   look suitably dramatic and  suggest  poetic  possibilities associated with the vibrant colours of the early morning pre-sunrise and/or  stormy  winter conditions.

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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.     

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