From the archives. 

The photos below are of the trunk of a river gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) that were  made around  the same time as this photo. It was an early experiment, using slow b+w film with a hand held film Leica M rangefinder, to explore a different approach to Leica M photography. 

The experiment was to try to move away from the Leica reportage/street photography  tradition; a tradition that is deemed to be the very heart and soul of what photography is. The move away  approach follows the pathway that   Heidegger carved out with  Being and Time, which is  to start from the  assumption that photography always has a site in history from which it inevitably inherits a past that is ‘more or less explicitly grasped’. 

There is a traditional tendency in photography  to adopt the concepts inherited from the past unthinkingly and as self-evident and the Leica  tradition of street photography was a hardened one that can  be loosened up, and the concealments that it has brought about can  be dissolved.  

This 'twisting free' approach  is not a negation of the past as it is concerned to explore whether or not  there was an alternative to Leica's  reportage/street photography  tradition?  Could  the film Leica M rangefinder be used in a different way to its foundational heritage of street photography? If  so, would this 'unconcealment' open up a space of possibilities that could be fruitfully explored photographically? 

 What then is concealed by the tradition of  street photography tradition?  It blocks off the possibility of other ways of photography. Can we retrieve what is forgotten and hidden -- eg., photographic abstraction or  photography as poiesis?

The Heideggerian pathway indicated that  this unconcealment could be done by stepping back to the more or less hidden sources of the photographic tradition itself. that is before the origins of the Leica M street photography tradition. A stepping back to  Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's earliest surviving camera photograph, circa 1826: View from the Window at Le Gras (Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France).This stepping back to photography's mimetic presuppositions is coupled to a  step forwards; that is the  photographic past from out of which we think is re-appropriated and interpreted anew.

Read more

The picture below is an abstraction of a section of the trunk of an eucalyptus tree in the Veale Gardens section of the Adelaide parklands in South Australia. It was  made using  an old Leica rangefinder camera from the 1980s ---- a M4-P with a 50mm Summicron prime lens.   This  very basic and simple film camera (manual focus, no light meter)  is the complete opposite to  the modern technology of contemporary digital cameras (Sony, Canon, Nikon).  

I  had some time on my hands that afternoon, so I  wandered around looking at the tracks of the various eucalypts.  I was looking for the possibilities for abstraction.  The colours of this  particular  trunk caught my eye. 

Read more

This wood  abstraction is from 2013. 

It is an  abstraction of a tree trunk in the Adelaide parklands:

I would have been on a poodlewalk in Veale Gardens at the time. The tree would have been cut down because it had been damaged in a storm. 

A reworking of an earlier post so that it becomes more of an abstraction.  

I am surprised that I didn't see this when I made the photograph whilst walking around Hobart, Tasmania.    I was making a lot of  photographic abstractions around 2012.