This picture or representation of quartz was made whilst I was on a coastal poodlewalk in Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia with Maleko, our standard poodle,  in the late afternoon. It was made around the same time as this image which is on the same 35mm roll of colour negative film.

 If it was overcast in the afternoon we would often wander  amongst these rocks on the  poodlewalks,  as the afternoon light is behind us and the soft light brings out the muted and subtle colours of  the rocks and quartz. 

This representational image of quartz is deemed to be a document created using a  transparent medium to produce an image that is readily intelligible. Hence it is a cliche that needed to be subverted by opening up the photographic process to explore the  possibilities of the photographic mediation of the world. That rejection of photographic transparency is the perspective of art history's account of the history of photography and it highlights how the logic of  20th century modernism is a culture of negation.   

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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.  

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The pictures below and over the page were made in 2021 whilst Maleko and I were on an afternoon  poodlewalk in  the littoral zone in Waitpinga in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula of  South Australia. We often walk along this section of the coast in the late afternoon. Photographically speaking, this littoral zone  works best in low or flat sunlight. It is no good in the bright afternoon sunlight of summer.

The pictures were made  with  my Leica M4-P with a  rigid Summicron 50mm pre-asph lens. As mentioned in an earlier post the rangefinder  recently became salt damaged from a rogue wave surging over me whilst I was photographing.  Leica  in Germany have since informed me that the lens is kaput (ie.,  unrepairable), but that they can repair the camera body.   I have given the go ahead  to repair the camera and  I am hoping that the insurance will cover most of the cost of buying a second hand Summicron 50mm pre-asph lens. 

That decision means that I remain committed to what some call vintage photography that many understand in terms of being wrapped up in nostalgia. Though not born into a digital world, but subsequently embracing it, I accept that I am  a nostalgic photographer whose optimistic  belief in the digital future is becoming outmoded.  What then is analogue nostalgia? 

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This  photo of an old log in the bushland in Waitpinga on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia was made in 2021 when I was on an early morning walking with  Kayla.  We spent a lot of time in the bushland, mostly in the early morning, throughout 2021 and  the winter of 2022. Sadly we had to put Kayla down this week, as she had cancer of the lymph nodes.   

This is a memory of our times together in the local bushland; a memory of  nature as  transience: 

During our times together in the local bushland I recovered a conception of nature as transience--conceptualizing the bushland in terms of change, passing away, perishing-- and not just as shapes and colours as in a modernist aesthetics. 

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The  photo below  is of a branch of a tree on the  side of a  backcountry road in Waitpinga on the Fleurieu Peninsula.  I often walk down this road or both the early morning and the afternoon poodlewalks. The road  runs alongside  some bushland,  which is where we wander around after walking along the length of the road. We usually wander through the bushland back to our starting point. 

The photo was  made in low light on an early morning poodlewalk.  

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The two  pictures below was made whilst I was on a poodlewalk in my local coastal area along  the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. They were  both made  with a 1970s handheld Leica rangefinder with Kodak Portra 400  ASA film. Its  bare bones  photography. The film  was then processed in a commercial lab and the negatives were  scanned to create a digital file (jpeg).  

This classical and hybrid approach to the photographic  is in marked contrast to the AI and computation that has entered the aesthetic realm in the second decade of the 20th century.  Aesthetic machines such as Midjourney's Discord server  can generate images that appear to be human made.  This  AI imaging is a machine-learning system, and it's  software enables you to create images that look like photographs, oil paintings, cartoons, etc. You can leave your expensive  camera in the cupboard. 

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I purchased  my silver Leica M4 rangefinder in Melbourne in the late 1970s. It quickly became my walk around camera and I became very comfortable  with a rangefinder as opposed to the then popular and more versatile single lens reflex film  cameras.  Unfortunately, the Leica's  rangefinder was damaged when it fell to the ground in Brisbane around 2011. The camera strap broke and the camera hit the concrete floor with a thud.  I then  lost  it  for around 10 years or so.  

It was found in 2021 and in early 2022 I sent it to Leica in Germany  to have the rangefinder repaired and the camera serviced.  I then bought a second hand, modern Summicron-M 35mm f/2 lens. 

Despite being made in the 1960s this 60 year camera  now looks and works as if it were new. I could see why  it's classically  minimal, industrial design or aesthetic would appeal to collectors;  and why it has a much higher monetary value today  than a contemporary  digital camera. (The Leica's value keeps on increasing). 

I started photographing with the unmetered Leica M4 using  black and white  film in a very modest way this year --the M6 was the first metered M rangefinder (manufactured between 1984 to 2003).  I  made  photos using Ilford HP 5 Plus film whilst I was on  the various  poodlewalks  in the local bushland. This  one of bark along Depledge Rd in Waitpinga  is one of the early photos that I made:

I was trying to see the world around me in black and white after years of photographing in colour.  A colour version is here.

We need to speak bluntly today.  

The bushfires in Australia are becoming more common and they are now more severe than they were due to climate change.They have become firestorms. 

This connection is often denied politically by those on the conservative side of politics who spin, dissemble and gaslight.   They say that historically Australia is a land of fire and flood.  Nothing new here. It is just the eternal recurrance of the same. This response represents  a denial of the danger of fire storm and it is a part of the conservatives  doing every thing possible to frustrate climate action.  

But the bushfires of yesterday are now the firestorms of today -- eg., the  fires along the Great Dividing Range  of the Black Summer of 2019-20.   These  fires were far from normal. 

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This   picture of bark hanging from a branch of a pink gum  was  made on an early morning  poodlewalk with Kayla. The walk  was  along Baum Rd in Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. 

The picture  was made around the same time,  and in the same location,  as this  picture. Both  pictures were made using  an old, hand held,  film Leica rangefinder  camera during the Covid-19 lockdown. The negatives  from the anachronistic, unmetered, mechanical simple   Leica M4-P were scanned using Plutek Opticfilm 8100 scanner,  which is a dedicated 35mm scanner. The scan is a piece of raw material, for later editing in Lightroom. 

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This picture was made early in the morning  whilst walking along Baum Rd in Waitpinga on a poodlewalk with Kayla.

It is  a freeze-frame  of a transient moment   in early spring  that was with a handheld  Leica  M4-P rangefinder and Kodak Portra 400 ASA film.  The picture is an exploration of visual poetics.

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