I do find the well known  criticism of photography as representation, which   is often made but those who hold that art is composed of sensation, to be  a  strange one.  The criticism  states that with representation the  photograph erases itself, as an object in itself, in favour of the thing depicted:   that is, the  photo becomes a metaphysical window on something else, in relation to which it is inferior - the image is of a lesser reality than the thing of which it is an  mage or to which it refers; that which it apparently represents. This metaphysical window is organised around the principle or logic of sameness. Hence the idea of good copies and bad copies. 

A  photograph as an art work  as distinct from a mere product as formed matter as it formed matter that shows something other than itself, that in some way has an intellectual content or meaning. What this  criticism gets right is that a photograph is  both a representation of  bark fragments and an object in itself,  and that the viewer's response to the image is composed of sensations or affects  (ie., the ways in which I respond in my bodily  encounter with the image and which arise out of my own previous knowledge, understanding and  experiences).  connection of model and origin

I find the criticism a strange or  misleading one.   After the demise of modernism,  why would  we say that the image is a lesser reality and  the bark primary? Surely the image is real and just as real  as the bark.   What we see on the screen  is an image -- it's blurry or  indistinct, has  a rich colour palette of green and orange and it is poetic in its approach to photography.    Even though we know that this photo is a representation -- an abstracture of the  pieces of bark that have peeled of the trunk of a tree --- we do not see the image as inferior to the bark.   We do not see  the bark, we do not mistake the image for the object  and we treat the image as a thing in its own right. 

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I have 5 rolls of 35mm colour  film that were exposed before the Leica M4-P was damaged by  saltwater and  sent back to the Leica factory in Germany to be repaired. That was  in December 2022. It now increasingly looks increasingly likely that the rangefinder  won't be repaired before I go walking in Japan in October. 

 3 of those 5 rolls were processed a while ago and I  scanned them over the weekend.  It's a slow process and whilst doing so I realised  just how much  I enjoyed the process of using an  analogue  Leica rangefinder to make a picture.  I miss the analogue process as techne --- the working of materials by a craft person who knows effective ways to use  the camera equipment to make good moves in the design space. This conception of the work of art as  techne is quite different to  the Romantic and modernist idea of creativity as a product of individual will, subjectivity, imagination. 

The realization  about techne was a kind of awakening or interruption to the flow or naturalised continuum of the myth making and  the beautiful semblance of digital photography.     

The interruption  was  not analogue nostalgia in a digital world, or a conservative romanticising of what has gone and been lost.    I realized  when  I was scanning the negatives that I  liked the look of film. Digital is  a much superior technological but film, with all  its limitations,  has its own  materiality and appearance. It   is also much more unpredictable than digital. So technological progress is not linear. There is a discontinuity here. In this  discontinuity or interruption  the idea of techne emerges. 

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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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This picture was made whilst I was wandering around an old Council rubbish dump in the late afternoon:

I was on a poodlewalk in Waitpinga, which is in the  southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. The dump is empty now.--its an edgeland. 

This picture was made whilst walking along the coast of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula:

It was made whilst on a poodlewalk during the early autumn of 2018. 

This  picture of First Creek in the Memorial Garden,  Burnside was made around 2010

It was during winter and there had been a lot of rain in the Adelaide Hills and the Mount Lofty Ranges  

An abstract image from when Suzanne and myself  were  in Wellington in 2015 before we   walked the Tongariro Alpine Crossing:

It is from the wharf precinct  in Wellington.  Suzanne and I spent a lovely Friday evening on the wharf. It was a warm,  balmy evening and everyone was out and about enjoying themselves.   Such evenings are few and far between in Wellington. 

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Myers Lane, Adelaide CBD 

This container was just around the corner from where I I lived in Sturt St in the CBD. It was part of the redevelopment (apartments) of an old industrial site. The redevelopment and urban renewal  never got off the ground due to the global financial crisis.    

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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As photography started to open up to digital imaging technologies  the territory has changed,  rather  than the 'digital' being another artistic practice.  What has emerged from this opening up is the idea of  the photographic style in which images are produced that look like photographs. 

This is work using  digital imaging technologies that is done 'in the manner of photography',  and it represents the marriage of the photographic with the graphic (hence the term 'photographics'). 

A style might be called 'photographic' when the reference to a photographic reality is left intact.  The  photographic style is an image's ability to reference a reality, as it would look in a photograph. Before the advent of image computation, photographic reality could only be represented in photographs, whereas in our digital age photography is no longer a prerequisite for the achievement of photographic reality.

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