I have been doing some haphazard reading  about Heidegger rethinking and conception of  poetics and   poiesis in order to develop  my understanding of, and explore  the possibilities  f photography as a poetics. 

Heidegger is difficult going and I've been struggling to understand what he is trying to do.  Heidegger's   reflections on art as poiesis highlights that it is directed toward the question of being and that it  locates the artwork as a specific modality of truth, a way in which truth can occur. This is premised on n decisively ontological distinction between the product (reduction of beings to  the will of the human being) and the work of art.  The artwork is traditionally distinguished from the product insofar as it is not merely formed matter, but formed matter that shows something other than itself, that in some way has an intellectual content or meaning.

The end point  of Heidegger's account of poiesis is that it is  a mode of disclosure  (a-letheia) of being in general (usually referred to as Being) Poiesis refers to  beings themselves to come to presence into the unhidden.   

This  account emerges from  Heidegger's  re-discovery of the pre-Socratics (eg., Heraclitus)  as  distinct from assimilating the pre-Socratics  to Plato and Aristotle, whom Heidegger interpreted as  the foundation  of Western philosophy.  The appropriation and critique of Aristotle lies at the very  heart of Heidegger's philosophical enterprise  regarding the question of being and its history. The  past from out of which we think has to be re-appropriated and interpreted anew, and his pathway was  to  rethink Greek ontology ‘more originally than’ the Greeks themselves.  Heidegger’s critique of the tradition (Aristotle) attempts to think more originally than this tradition in order to transform it.

In the foundational Greek  philosophy, according to Heidegger,   poiesis was orientated to everyday production: ie., the artist  projects an image of the object  i.e. its intended look with the artist shaping the raw material into an artefact thereby  fulfilling this intention.with the product becoming a likeness of imitation of this image/model. This representational model of art is premised on the subject/object  duality. Heifdegger initially accepts this model of poiesis,   but he then deconstructs it by way of returning to the pre-Socratics: he sees them differently to Plato and Aristotle. 

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The picture below is from a morning walk along the coastal rocks  in the  littoral  zone of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula ---probably the platform of rocks just after  Dep's Beach: 

I have been reading about the history of the modern 35mm system camera as a result of some  experiments using  a 1960  Zeiss-Ikon Contaflex Super (SLR)  and some expired 35mm Fuji Velvia 50 that had been gifted to me.  I knew next to nothing about Zeiss-Ikon, only that Zeiss today make high quality lenses, and so I wanted to learn about what happened to the German camera industry before Japanese innovation swept all before them,  what had been lost and what is now absent.  

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This is a companion post to this previous one. 

That post explored the photographer being immersed in the bushland rather than separate from it. It asked the question: 'can the idea of  photography as poetics  provide a different conception of truth to the  indexical  correspondent one, which is  the traditional understanding of truth in photography.'

The photo can  disclose a moment in the bushland. Photography as poiesis is a mode of disclosure  (aletheia) of being. Discloses in the sense of opens up or unconceals. In doing so the photo is  both a poetics and is thoughtful.

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The picture  below is a representation of a landscape detail that was made  whilst  I wandering  in the Waitpinga bushland in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula on a poodlewalk with Maleko. At the time  I was exploring the  possibilities of  b+w poetics: 

It would have been in the late afternoon during the winter  months as I do not walk  in the bushland with the standard poodles in spring or summer in the afternoon because of the Eastern brown snake, which  are venomous. 

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The photo below was made in the early morning at Gassan Shizu Hot Springs at  Nishikawa in the Yamagata Prefecture.   We had just spent the last week or so on a Basho walking tour in  the Tohoku region in  Honshu, Japan.  The tour had  started in Sendai and Gassan Shizu was  the last morning of the  fascinating l Basho walk 

 Mt. Gassan, one of the three  sacred mountains of Dewa Sanzan is in the background. The other two sacred mountains are Mt Yudono and Mt Haguro, which had visited  prior to our overnight  stay at Gassan Shizu.

Shortly after I'd made the  above photo the tour  was taken by the hotel  bus to Yamagata Station where we went our separate ways.   We  travelled by  Shinkansen to Tokyo then on to Osaka  to begin walking  the Kumano Kodo pilgrim trail, self-guided. 

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The  well known fragment  123 of Heraclitus reads: "Nature loves to hide itself'.

The Australian bush can be quite messy, dense  and chaotic  and  quite  difficult to walk in and  to photograph. Often there are no pathways through the thicket  and you have to go around it.

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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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Remember the industrial world of film or analogue photography from yesteryear?  It wasn't that long ago. The grey haired ones, if they are still active,  were encultured  in it.  Since it was yesteryear we can look back at it. 

 In the early and  mid-twentieth century -- probably up to the late 1970s or early 1980s in Australia ---  we understood photography in a specific way. We carefully shot the scene, ensuring our originality, then  culled carefully down the accumulated photos on the contact sheet  to the best Images. We were  carefully taught  to examine a contact sheet and pick out "the good ones" and circle them with a red pen. 

What were the good ones? Those that represented the Truth  (an objective representation of the way things really are) or expressed significant form. We then  carefully printed the good ones  on paper in the chemical darkroom making sure that what was eventually produced was the fine print. 

The photograph was a carefully made singular object, to be revered and inspected closely. It was fitted into that Enlightenment, linear, mechanized, system of being centred around progress.  The idea was that it showed us Truth (though significant  Form) about the nature of things.  We were informed that we should accordingly inspect the picture carefully (or at least pretend to) and give it the respect it is due with a close reading. Only a few could make being a photographer. The art galleries and university departments adhered to modernist values—the authority of the artist, the expertise of the curator and the discourse of the modern as the new, 

That world has long gone. In the 21st century digital photography is our current world. We are in a new era of photography that is shaped by the internet,  social media and the smart phone. This  is an image world of fleeting, fragmentary  impressions,  instant likes,  pretentious Influencers and persuasive hucksters offering the real deal.  Social media, the internet  and  their  computational mode of production  transform a marginalized film photography's  precarious existence into something other than what it once was -- the  internet  transforms it into a networked image that is viewed on a screen.  The analogue photo is a hybrid as it is shaped by an algorithmic logic,  is  treated no differently to a digital image,  and it is no longer culturally significant  how the image was produced.     

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I have just re-discovered  the low-tech  Leicaphilia blog of  Timothy Vanderweert and his personal writing about film and digital photography. , what Vanderweert I learned  that  Vanderweert died in July 2023 from cancer, but  thankfully,  his wife has kept his Wordpress blog online so we can still read it.  Leicaphilia's combination of image and text that reminds us  yet  again of  how few are the blogs by photographers that interweave good photographs and insightful writing about photography and are in it for the long haul.  

A number of Vanderweert  posts on Leicaphilia are concerned with various  experiments to compare  digital black and white  photos  to those made with  fast and grainy b+w film, such as Kodak Tri-X films and  various digital attempts to emulate the  Tri-X  film look or  emulate an HP5 negative. I personally think that is going down a rabbit  hole.  Why try to make digital look like film for though these are  the same (photography)  they are also  different. The uses of photographs  are different, the cultural impacts are different, the way they're made is different.  Why not  accept the differences between the film and digital technologies and the historical differences between the two  eras/centuries and get on with digital photography?  

The industrial world that  film photography was a part of is long gone. That means turning away from the legacy ecosystem,  then accepting and working with what Vanderweert characterises as the transparent, ultra-lucidity of digital files, their noiseless purity, lack of grain  and  what some see as a  certain lack of presence or sterility.  We have a new,  albeit flawed photography.  

No doubt, the technology of  a digital B&W photography will improve as the  resources of the industry are applied to overcoming that plastic look too often seen with digital B&W files. Eventually,  the resources will  pay off  with  an appealing  graduated tonality  emerging in digital B&W photography.

Reading Vanderweert's  blog  made me wonder if there were any other similar Leica blogs on the internet, that is ones involving writing  about photography.  Unfortunately, there are no links on the legacy Leicaphilia blog for me to follow up.  It is very much a stand alone blog. The similar blogs, if they existed,  probably have come and gone --- 99 per cent of new blogs die within their first year,  primarily due to their  failure to attract a significant number of readers. Even Still Searching, that was backed by Fotomuseum Winterthur,  has packed it in. 

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I don't recall the exact occasion when I made this b+w abstraction of the trunk of a humble and ordinary tree in remnant bushland.  I remember  the location though.  I was walking in the local Waitpinga bushland on a poodlewalk with Kayla and it was an intuitive rather than a planned photo. 

I also remember that it  was  made after  I'd started  reading  Matsuo Bashō, the great haiku  poet  (1644–1694), whose self-image  of a recluse/wayfarer  and eccentric was the basis for  the  poetic possibilities in his Oku no hosomichi (The narrow road to the deep north, 1689). I was  reading him in preperation for going on a Basho walking tour  in 2023.     

The time  of the photo would have been sometime during  2023 and so  probably  after  this  post, which was  when  I was  wondering  whether it was worthwhile  to re-start photographing  with 35mm b+w film. 

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