I have been doing some haphazard reading  about Heidegger rethinking and conception of  poetics and   poiesis in order to develop  my understanding of, and explore  the possibilities  f photography as a poetics. 

Heidegger is difficult going and I've been struggling to understand what he is trying to do.  Heidegger's   reflections on art as poiesis highlights that it is directed toward the question of being and that it  locates the artwork as a specific modality of truth, a way in which truth can occur. This is premised on n decisively ontological distinction between the product (reduction of beings to  the will of the human being) and the work of art.  The artwork is traditionally distinguished from the product insofar as it is not merely formed matter, but formed matter that shows something other than itself, that in some way has an intellectual content or meaning.

The end point  of Heidegger's account of poiesis is that it is  a mode of disclosure  (a-letheia) of being in general (usually referred to as Being) Poiesis refers to  beings themselves to come to presence into the unhidden.   

This  account emerges from  Heidegger's  re-discovery of the pre-Socratics (eg., Heraclitus)  as  distinct from assimilating the pre-Socratics  to Plato and Aristotle, whom Heidegger interpreted as  the foundation  of Western philosophy.  The appropriation and critique of Aristotle lies at the very  heart of Heidegger's philosophical enterprise  regarding the question of being and its history. The  past from out of which we think has to be re-appropriated and interpreted anew, and his pathway was  to  rethink Greek ontology ‘more originally than’ the Greeks themselves.  Heidegger’s critique of the tradition (Aristotle) attempts to think more originally than this tradition in order to transform it.

In the foundational Greek  philosophy, according to Heidegger,   poiesis was orientated to everyday production: ie., the artist  projects an image of the object  i.e. its intended look with the artist shaping the raw material into an artefact thereby  fulfilling this intention.with the product becoming a likeness of imitation of this image/model. This representational model of art is premised on the subject/object  duality. Heifdegger initially accepts this model of poiesis,   but he then deconstructs it by way of returning to the pre-Socratics: he sees them differently to Plato and Aristotle. 

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This is another picture in my little  experiment   in  a black and white poetics:

The picture  is of a small salt pan near Petrel Cove on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. It was made in the summer of 2023. The two earlier pictures in the experiment are here and here  

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Just when I'd decided to definitely give up using my venerable  Leica M4-P and 35m colour film,   and make  the definite  shift to the cutting technological edge of  hand held digital imaging, up pops this image.  

It is a simple and nondescript  coastal bush growing along the railway line  and the picture  was made on one of my early morning poodle walks at Hayborough, Victor Harbor on the Fleurieu Peninsula. It is what is  usually ignored or a disregarded  aspects of the contemporary coastal  landscape that would  be seen as the "unphotographable"  by many contemporary DSLR photographers. 

What popped up  is photography as poetics. Photography in a quiet voice. 

Therein lies the strength of a film Leica ---whether colour or black and white---in today's digital world where  the global trend is to product differentiation and short product cycles in which  companies  reduce costs by re-using as many components as possible.   We have reached a point where different digital cameras and systems converge to the same level of performance,  and the differences that exist are increasingly irrelevant for the average user.  In this world it is the camera's features that become the crucial markers  for the tech journalists ever on the lookout  for the next big thing to write about.    

Photography as poetics points to the mood, feeling and emotion that an image  creates or produces.  This is a revision of the classical Leica ethos  of a camera  designed to  record daily events as a visual memory: thirty-six memories on one roll of film that are an honest and detailed record of the world.

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