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.  

Read more

 My Leica M film rangefinder is locked in the past. I bought the analogue rangefinder  on the basis of craftsmanship in the 1970s when it was already  being marginalised  by the innovative, Japanese SLR cameras. In 2022 the film M is technologically  obsolete but it works.  

 I am no True Believer in Leica, its  myths or seductive mystique.  What I currently have  is a well made, vintage  film camera with a minimalist industrial design that requires a considered approach to photographing the world around me.   

 This picture was made in 2021 when I was starting to photographically  explore   the Spring Mount Conservation Park in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia.

Spring Mount  is a local stringybark conservation park in the ranges that run alongside the Inman Valley. It  lies  between, and separates,  the Hindmarsh Tiers and  the  Inman Valley.  

Read more

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.

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. 

Read more

There is a view that film photography after digitalisation provides a way to create poetry because the convenience of digitalization  also tidies things up, correcting mistakes and eliminating chance.  If this analogue media of contemporary art  involves a backward glance to what has been, as we become ever more immersed in digital media, it also keeps photography  open to chance.  

You don't know what you are going to get with film, even when the photo has been carefully scoped and theme of the shoot  carefully selected.  

Made on a poodlewalk along the Heysen Trail in Waitpinga, South Australia,   in 2016 

I went back in the autumn of 2017 to rephotograph with bigger cameras,  but the bark had fallen to the ground from the winter storms.