This picture was made  whilst I was travelling on the train to  Fairfield in Melbourne. 

The heyday of the Leica photography  was 1930 to 1980, a period when the Leica M rangefinder  reigned supreme as the best performing 35mm camera-system for snapshots, reportage and street photography that rested on the principles of craft.   Today Leica, as a  small-scale camera maker  in the digital age,  with its shortening of product cycles,  has  become a niche product for the cognoscenti and a select group of professionals.

 Being ‘critically sharp’ is no longer a standard feature of Leica photographs, nor is  the M digital  camera unique in its compactness or unobtrusiveness or ease of use, as these are also characteristics of the Sony Alpha mirrorless  cameras. The latter can also produce the desired qualities of a picture--qualities as tonality, crispness of fine detail in the midtones, separation of highlight and shadow detail and depth preservation-- and they can use the M + R Leica lenses, which are some of the best lenses ever made. Digital gives photographers  more resources and it evens the playing field.

The  cognoscenti and a select group of professionals include art photographers who continue to use old media technology such as 35m film  in reaction to the  in-your-face, super-saturated, super-contrasty glossy imagery that appears to be the digital norm in photography.  Film, it is argued,  has a different aesthetic---a different look that is softer and grainer---  and it remains more craft-based with a slowness of process. Though digital has a different look to film ---its much more crisp and clean---photographic software can mimic the look of film.  Digital has developed an ‘analogue aesthetic.’ 

Continuing to use 35m film in a digital world  is not limited to grandparents and hipsters hooked on retro,   as it is also grounded in nostalgia for a different world; one in which there was a strong tradition in precision engineering, optical technology,  photography and quality cameras.  One aspect of this nostalgic reaction is a flight away from the complex problematics of a period of crisis and toward the cosy certainties of an earlier age;  another is the rejection of the recombinant media strategies of re-use, appropriation, media-critique, re-presentation, cut-up, “deconstruction,” etc. (often all lumped under the umbrella term: “post-modernism”); another strand  is the desire for purity in reaction to consumerism and the slick digital surface.      

Is this the emergence of a post digital aesthetic that attempts to transgress the shiny facade of a technology promising perfection but which has lots of glitches and bugs in practice including the  deficiencies of digital files?  A post digital aesthetic no longer considers digitalness revolutionary,  and the term “post-digital” best functions  as a descriptor of the reaction of arts to the cultural impact of digitization, rather than  implying  only one single moment of a historical break.   

By now I  had morphed into a photographer who was straddling the film and digital worlds with little idea  of the digital world was closing in on me,  or was reshaping photography. I was primarily looking at images on the monitor but still thinking  of photography in the old film terms --eg., the snapshot of the Nth Melbourne railway station whilst I was on the road.  

I had  not yet realised that curators  would frame the pushing the boundaries of art photography as  primarily  coming from  the use of computer software to create complex imagery that stood in stark contrast  to the mundane and normal digital photography being produced.  

I was vaguely thinking in terms of self-publishing the best  photographs from my portfolio. Only I didn't really have a portfolio.  Nor was I sure how to go about creating one---other than taking lots of photographs,  selecting the best, and approaching Blurb. 

John Szarkowski challenged the ability of photography to explain large-scale public subjects in both the preface to The Photographer's Eye (1966) and in Mirrors and Windows (1978). In The Photographer's Eye he wrote, "Photography has never been successful at narrative" and he declared the fields of photojournalism and documentary non-effectual in Mirrors and Windows writing, "Photography's failure to explain large public issues has become increasingly clear...Most issues of importance cannot be photographed." He argued that attempts to photograph World War II were unable to explain events without heavy captioning. 

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Some hold that there are  two kinds of photographers, collectors and sculptors. Sculptor type photographers are those who set up a scene,  creating it from scratch,  and then take a picture of it.  In contrast, collector type photographers  wander, bringing things home that they find out in the world and they  often have a vague idea or kind of personal fantasy that they look for out in the world.

The process of wandering is central to my Leica snapshots. When I walk the city my route is seldom pre-conceived and I am not looking for very specific things. I did not  have a list of things to photograph  in my notebook.  I would often walk with the standard poodles. 

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I've started going though the archives on the hard drive of the Mac-Pro  in the studio to see what I was photographing  when I was using  the Leica. I'm looking back  to see if it was  just  snaps or did I start exploring themes? 

Sadly, most of the images look like happy snaps. The pictorial equivalent of the readymade characterised by unpretentious snapshot effects, documentary value, and deadpan anti aesthetic qualities.    They were not the result of a deliberate abnegation of authorial control in favor of chance, accident, and automatism. 

This picture of a window in Clunes, Victoria, circa 2009 is an exception. It's darker than most of the pictures--and  it expresses a  darker side of the senses and imagination than Australia's blue skies and bright clear light: 

It  represents the experiences  caused by unresolved loss, commonly known as a state of mourning. Mourning refers to what has  passed away, leaving  us with only images. It refers to the trauma that loss evokes--in this picture  the loss of the  way of life of the country towns in regional Australia. 

Historically,   Australia was represented and imagined  by explorers and cartographers  as a grotesque space, a land peopled by monsters. It was a place of darkness and convicts.  Its sense of disorientation and complete isolation from the civilised European world was unnerving. The Antipodes were  held to be a dark and evil place, an unconquered territory overbrimming with dangerous secrets.

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For photographers, the digital revolution began in earnest in the early years of the 21^st century. This disruption resulted in cameras transitioning from optical and mechanical devices used to expose film to light, to imaging computers that convert light into electrical charges, which are then processed into digital information. 

 Digital makes  photography so much easier. Digital post-production was a  game changer,   since  good software could suddenly fix a lot of issues and anomalies far more cheaply, and in many cases better, than hardware could manage. The emphasis in digital  was on  resolution--- as if resolution is going to provide the content of the picture.  

With the digital revolution the use of Leica's film rangefinders  was reduced to an even smaller  segment of the market than it had been during  the SLR  film days,  and this resulted in Leica facing  the oblivion of bankruptcy.    It looked as if the rangefinder experience ---the camera was small and light,  its shutter was quieter, it was easy to focus in low light,  and it  attracted far less attention from people on the street--could well belong to  photographic history.   

That rangefinder finder experience shapes  how I look at modern digital cameras. I am looking for one that inherits, and builds on, the rangefinder legacy-- rather the SLR tradition.  The rangefinder  legacy -small, unobtrusive, well-designed, modern in concept, affordable, and offering a high quality user experience--- wasn't really  being made, and so there  isn't a new and modern way to pursue rangefinder photography in the digital era.  Leica's digital rangefinders were not affordable. 

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Digital technology offered a number  of advantages.  It equalled the image quality of 35m film,   it was far more convenient re work flow,  and  it was  far more  cost  effective to use  to making photos on a daily basis. The downside of digital technology is the limited lifespan or built in obsolescence of  the camera body.   These are akin to computers--you can get 3-5 years wear and tear and that is it.  Unlike  the  bodies  of film cameras the bodies of digital cameras are not built to last.   I continued  to use the  Leica M4-P. 

However, since digital  technology  allowed me  to take lots of snapshot photos regularly,  using  a  Sony NEX-7 mirrorless camera  that I could use with my Leica lenses allowed me to use my  snapshot photography to experiment,   play around and  to scope for the large format film photography.   

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This position holds that street art is increasingly populated with artists whose ambitions are to secure good gallery representation, whilst  graffiti culture has no such aspiration.

CDH's argument is that commercial street art heavily trades on the street cred of the outlaw persona that accompanies it, but writing largely paid the price for this credibility. Writers are the ones breaking into train yards and going to prison, while street artists are putting up legal murals or token stencils in back laneways and occasionally having their work buffed. 

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Adelaide has very few recent urban ruins.  So this does not provide a  fruitful way to explore the past  and the present caused by economic downturn, natural disasters,  environmental accidents, or a rustbelt city's decline.  What it does have is a lot of nineteenth century heritage buildings that stand empty. It is these building that many use to frame  Adelaide   as backward because it rejected “progress" in the form of   post-war architectural internationalism.  Preserving  the old is seen to be  condemning the city to stagnation. 

Adelaide's decaying buildings and empty urban  lots that have been marked by street artists, such as Jules:  

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I started wandering into empty sites, alleyways and empty buildings in Adelaide. It was  a way of getting to know the city that I was living in,  a form of urban exploration into Alt-Adelaide   in a world increasingly marked by the transitory, liquidity  and precariousness. 

Urban exploration is usually associated with  exploring  little-known urban spaces like abandoned buildings, rooftops, construction sites, drains, transit and utility tunnels and more. Michelle Dicinoski in The Future that never took Place: exploring Detroit's Abandoned Buildings  in Meanjin says that:

Urban exploration, or ‘urbex’, can be described as ‘seeking out, visiting and documenting interesting human-made spaces, most typically abandoned buildings, construction sites, active buildings, stormwater drains, utility tunnels and transit tunnels’. That’s the definition given by Jeff Chapman, aka Ninjalicious, a Canadian explorer who literally wrote the book on urbex with his guide Access All Areas. 

The increased interest in urban exploring (or  ‘place hacking’) may well result from  the growth in surveillance technology and the shrinking of public space. 

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