Throughout the winter of 2023 I would often spend an hour or so wandering  through  the local Waitpinga bushland with Kayla on an early morning   poodlewalk.  I'd be walking in the bushland  just after sunrise,  and whilst walking  I started  a bark series with  the Leica M4-P. It would be one camera, one lens, one film and it would centre on the ontology of the object in the present moment.  The bark is so mundane, that if we encounter it in everyday life, we would barely register it.

There are some earlier photos  that preceded  this series as a conscious walking art  project,  and they can be interpreted as  pointing to what was to become. These early  photos  can be viewed   here and here  and here. Oh, and here.   They emerged from drifting --from becoming lost in the bushland, being  responsive to chance and to circumstance, and privileging  the reactivity of the walk itself.

It is a low key walking art series,  which  explores  the ephemera of the mundane  bark  peeling off the trunks and branches of the pink gums; or the piles of bark lying  on the ground. The transience of the  bark,   its decay and disintegration (ie., perishability) is one of the more recognisable aspects of  the  flux,  or  the constant change in  the  bushland apart from the occasional fallen tree. It was slow walking whilst keeping an eye out for foxes, kangaroos, and rabbits so I could prevent Kayla from chasing them.

The series as a walking art project is premised on a meditative walking and seeing (of being in the ephemeral present) and  on the photography  being simple.   It  is underpinned by Japanese aesthetics,  with its minimalist approach and  complex and sophisticated categories with multiple interpretations (eg., wabi-wabi).  It  is  a modest,  walking art project that is contrary, or offside to,  the currently fashionable photographic approach to make  hero mages that celebrates the photographer's vision.  

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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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Since film is undergoing a nostalgic  resurgence --Pentax says it is planning  to make film cameras again-- I thought that I would post a  second  example from  the  salt-water damaged  roll of  35mm film. This  was in the Leica M4-P rangefinder when a rogue wave crashed over me,   soaking the camera and destroying the lens.  The camera  body is currently in the process of  being repaired by Leica in Wetzlar who have recently advised that it should be returned to Australia by the end of June.  

Here is the photo:  

It  is actually a more interesting photo of the wooden structure of the old Granite Island causeway  than  it would have been if the film  was  normal or non-damaged. What it shows is that it  is the materiality of film that opens up opportunities to  treat  the film differently   during the developmental process.  You can play around with the filmic material if you want to,  but  colour film is  now expensive. 

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