The previous post finished by asking:'  What then is poiesis that is uncovered by the twisting free and  the stepping back to the more or less hidden sources of the Leica street photography tradition?'

The  stepping back in the post was to a birth certificate of photography, namely   Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's earliest surviving camera photograph, circa 1826: View from the Window at Le Gras (Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France). It is a stepping back to photography's own mimetic presuppositions in preparation for an overcoming; a self-overcoming of photography  itself. This stepping back to is coupled to a  step forwards; that is the  photographic past from out of which we think is  re-appropriated and interpreted anew. It is re-interpreting the original  photographic presuppositions  as other to  the street photography tradition's   interpretations of the birth certificate of photography. 

The other that is uncovered is photography as poetics or poiesis. What then is poiesis?

The influential interpretation -- that of Benjamin mimetic faculty and behaviour and  Adorno's  adapation and assimilation to others  ---  is poiesis is mimesis with Adorno giving a historical account of the development of the various meanings  of mimesis that is counterpoised to, and been repressed by,  instrumental reason through the historical civilising process.  With Heidegger poiesis stands  opposed to the calculative constructions of technological enflaming in which being is reduced to a standing reserve or a resource ordered and controlled by the modern techno-sciences.This is an ontological reduction of things to their utility  and nature to a resource.     

 This reflection on the poetic (or poietic, to use the Greek term)  refers to Aristotle's conception of poiesis as making or producing things and the conception of artistic creation and  craftwork that is oriented to the horizon of production. The process of making is definite: it has a definite beginning: the blue print of the product. It has a definite end: the completion of the product. For Aristotle, the end of poiesis is beyond poiesis itself since the finished product is always for someone and something, for the use to which it can be put.  

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This picture was made  whilst I was travelling on the train to  Fairfield in Melbourne. 

The post-photography emerged  in the late 1980s as a result of the emergence of digital technology.  

Digital technology has allowed for the image to be severed from its referent,  re-contextualized and re-presented. The theory goes that notions of representational truth in photography have well and truly been destroyed in light of technology that recasts the image as a fluid entity. The emergence of new digital technologies has undercut our  trust in the photograph, which  more than any other kind of image as faithfully documenting the reality of the material world.  We have relied on it to describe places, to prove things existed, and to recall the memorable. This confidence we have warranted in traditional  photography, was  irrecoverably shattered by the emergence of new digital technologies --hence the concern over the ‘loss of the real’. 

However it was not the digital camera that gave birth to the post-photographic, it was the scanner as digital cameras have only become sophisticated enough to be taken seriously in the last decade. In the 1990s  scanners were generally used to digitize portions of chemically processed images that were then manipulated and assembled in Photoshop. The combination of this hardware and software meant that artists were almost forced to supplement montage for traditional straight photography that depended upon the indexical power of photos. It is this  technology and workflow,  and not digital photography per se, that  was the condition for the emergence of  the post-photographic.

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The Leica  camera's  has a classical  minimalist design. For Leica form follows function. This is such a contrast to the computerised digital cameras of today. 

The bottom line of the Leica camera (film based or filmless) is that  it is grounded in the great German tradition of solid engineering. The film based products, like those from Linhof,  last forever and do not bring repeat business. 

During the 20th century Leica developed excellent technical solutions, supplied reliable goods and created long-lasting relationships with the customers. The main qualities - over-engineering, obsession with detail and an extreme emphasis on durability - demand a price: the products last a lifetime  and do not bring repeat business. 

The  M4-P (1981)  was primitive technology compared to the Cannon and Nikon DSLR's that other photographers were using. Leica is a conservative company--the single lens reflex  film cameras had  eclipsed rangefinders in the 1970s! 

The  M4-P  did not add much to the progress of the rangefinder camera. It  is a manual-focus camera and it  did not add automatic exposure metering with manual selection of either shutter speed or aperture that was very accurate. I still  had to use a hand held light meter or guess the exposure.  It was primitive technology compared to the Cannon and Nikon DSLR's that other photographers were using. Leica was a conservative company. 

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Traditionally photography does not have, as the saying goes, the ear of those in power in the art institution.  It  has been historically  viewed unfavorably by the art world, and advocates for a photography museum/gallery  did not receive a sympathetic hearing until the last quarter of the 20th century.   Art photography eschewed functional and directly commercial applications of photography (e.g. snapshots, advertising) and defined itself in opposition to this. Its conception of art’s autonomy was generally understood as the distance that art takes from the world and its gestures of rebellion and resistance were few and far between. 

Art photography’s achievements in the lat 20th century were  based largely on an aesthetic of the photographic – meaning that there are distinct inherent properties of the medium itself that give it value as an art-form, and the skilled practitioner can employ these properties in order to produce expressive work. 

 A core tenet of Szarkowski's New York modernist tradition's  outlook on photography is that it, as a specific medium,  is fundamentally different from other picture-making processes in that it is based on selection rather than synthesis: – the photographer takes elements of the real world for his picture, whereas the painter makes the elements of his picture from scratch.  Szarkowski's aesthetic reason  assumed  that the painter selects from their imagination, whereas the photographer must select from the real world.     

The notions of art, autonomy, and progress  in the contemporary art practices of the second half of the 20th century were divorced from the historical European avant-garde's commitment to the project of destroying the false autonomy of bourgeois art. The concern of the art institution and the academic discourses and institutions was to establish a  canon of Australian photography to highlight Australia's modernity. 

We experienced the shock of the new in a set of dead classics. This discourse  identified the avant-garde with a selective canon of modern art, whereby this exclusive canon valorized, furthermore, as an inevitable historical trajectory the move of advanced artistic practice from Europe to the United States then to Australia.