The two bark abstracts below were my initial attempt at abstract poetics with black and white film (IlFord HP5 Plus 400 ASA). I was reading Lyle Rexer's The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography at the time. Most of the recent photographic abstractions are digital and in colour eg., the various artists in the Helsinki School. I had little interest in the cameraless photogram or directly changing the surface of unexposed photographic papers by burning, soaking, inscribing them etc as did Marco Breuer.
Could abstraction work now by returning to back and white film? So after Leica replaced the damaged range finder of the M4 I decided to experiment by using 35mm black and white film. I was more or less picking up from where I'd left off prior to the photographic culture's shift to digital technology in the first decade of 21st century.
I had stopped photographing in 35mm black and white in the 1990s when the range finder of the M4 was damaged and it could not be repaired in Australia. Since my return to photography around 2006 I have only photographed with 35mm in colour using an M4-P rangefinder.