The  well known fragment  123 of Heraclitus reads: "Nature loves to hide itself'.

The Australian bush can be quite messy, dense  and chaotic  and  quite  difficult to walk in and  to photograph. Often there are no pathways through the thicket  and you have to go around it.

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Remember the industrial world of film or analogue photography from yesteryear?  It wasn't that long ago. The grey haired ones, if they are still active,  were encultured  in it.  Since it was yesteryear we can look back at it. 

 In the early and  mid-twentieth century -- probably up to the late 1970s or early 1980s in Australia ---  we understood photography in a specific way. We carefully shot the scene, ensuring our originality, then  culled carefully down the accumulated photos on the contact sheet  to the best Images. We were  carefully taught  to examine a contact sheet and pick out "the good ones" and circle them with a red pen. 

What were the good ones? Those that represented the Truth  (an objective representation of the way things really are) or expressed significant form. We then  carefully printed the good ones  on paper in the chemical darkroom making sure that what was eventually produced was the fine print. 

The photograph was a carefully made singular object, to be revered and inspected closely. It was fitted into that Enlightenment, linear, mechanized, system of being centred around progress.  The idea was that it showed us Truth (though significant  Form) about the nature of things.  We were informed that we should accordingly inspect the picture carefully (or at least pretend to) and give it the respect it is due with a close reading. Only a few could make being a photographer. The art galleries and university departments adhered to modernist values—the authority of the artist, the expertise of the curator and the discourse of the modern as the new, 

That world has long gone. In the 21st century digital photography is our current world. We are in a new era of photography that is shaped by the internet,  social media and the smart phone. This  is an image world of fleeting, fragmentary  impressions,  instant likes,  pretentious Influencers and persuasive hucksters offering the real deal.  Social media, the internet  and  their  computational mode of production  transform a marginalized film photography's  precarious existence into something other than what it once was -- the  internet  transforms it into a networked image that is viewed on a screen.  The analogue photo is a hybrid as it is shaped by an algorithmic logic,  is  treated no differently to a digital image,  and it is no longer culturally significant  how the image was produced.     

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Throughout the winter of 2023 I would often spend an hour or so wandering  through  the local Waitpinga bushland with Kayla on an early morning   poodlewalk.  I'd be walking in the bushland  just after sunrise,  and whilst walking  I started  a bark series with  the Leica M4-P. It would be one camera, one lens, one film and it would centre on the ontology of the object in the present moment.  The bark is so mundane, that if we encounter it in everyday life, we would barely register it.

There are some earlier photos  that preceded  this series as a conscious walking art  project,  and they can be interpreted as  pointing to what was to become. These early  photos  can be viewed   here and here  and here. Oh, and here.   They emerged from drifting --from becoming lost in the bushland, being  responsive to chance and to circumstance, and privileging  the reactivity of the walk itself.

It is a low key walking art series,  which  explores  the ephemera of the mundane  bark  peeling off the trunks and branches of the pink gums; or the piles of bark lying  on the ground. The transience of the  bark,   its decay and disintegration (ie., perishability) is one of the more recognisable aspects of  the  flux,  or  the constant change in  the  bushland apart from the occasional fallen tree. It was slow walking whilst keeping an eye out for foxes, kangaroos, and rabbits so I could prevent Kayla from chasing them.

The series as a walking art project is premised on a meditative walking and seeing (of being in the ephemeral present) and  on the photography  being simple.   It  is underpinned by Japanese aesthetics,  with its minimalist approach and  complex and sophisticated categories with multiple interpretations (eg., wabi-wabi).  It  is  a modest,  walking art project that is contrary, or offside to,  the currently fashionable photographic approach to make  hero mages that celebrates the photographer's vision.  

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Leica Australia have just informed me that the camera body of the  salt water damaged  M4-P rangefinder (circa 1980s) has been repaired and that it is on the way from Wetzlar in Germany to Sydney, Australia.   Sadly, the Leica 50mm Summicron f.2  lens is unrepairable as was the basic Sekonic light meter (a Sekonic L-308 S) that  I'd been using.   I need to buy another 50mm Summicron and,  unfortunately  for me, these  lenses aren't cheap,  even the second hand ones. So it won't be going with me to Japan in October.  

I have missed not using the M4-P (one camera one lens) the last 10 months that it  has been in Germany.  I found the simplicity of the camera (one body, one prime lens) so appealing. The simplicity of the rangefinder is that it reduces the gap between meditative  seeing and the camera's sight. It is a shift towards becoming one with the camera.

I made the above photo  in  the winter of  2022.  It is from one of the 5 rolls of 400 ASA Portra that I'd exposed  prior to  the M4-P becoming  badly damaged. It was the late afternoon  winter light that caught my eye  as I was walking  along one of the various paths in the bushland that were  made by the kangaroos  with Kayla.   

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The photo  below was made on an early morning  poodlewalk with Kayla in 2022 in the local bushland in Waitpinga on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. The photo was made around the same time as this black and white one. 

Kayla and I did a lot of  our early morning walks in this particular  bushland,  as it was one of her favourite places to walk in. We would  come across  foxes, rabbits and  kangaroos in the winter/spring months and  so there were lots of scents for there.  She would wait whilst I photographed. On this occasion  I was attracted by the subtle colours of the bark and the leaves. 

This image  is produced by  a form of lens-based photography as distinct from the photographic.  Then former involves creating images using light,  a camera and film.  (Digital technology replaces film with a sensor.)   We need to make a distinction  between photography and the photographic  and to see them as two distinct entities,  given the emergence of AI-generated images. Our  photographic language has become a free floating entity separated from (lens-based ) photography and it now has a life of its own.

That is our starting point in the current situation.   

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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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