The picture below is a representation of a landscape detail that was made whilst I wandering in the Waitpinga bushland in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula on a poodlewalk with Maleko. At the time I was exploring the possibilities of b+w poetics:
It would have been in the late afternoon during the winter months as I do not walk in the bushland with the standard poodles in spring or summer in the afternoon because of the Eastern brown snake, which are venomous.
The picture as a representation of bark and light is classical photography: the image represents a world to a subject. In modernity the world is represented as a picture, knowledge is guarantied by the accuracy or correctness of the correspondence between images and entities in the world, and we understand ourselves as Cartesian subjects, separated from objects “out there. The world is a spatial arena of objects, which we encounter as resources—for photography.Can photography can speak of the world differently?
Can the idea of photography as poetics help to rethink this entrenched and traditional understanding of metaphysics? To loosen it up. In order that we can see that the various objects in the Waitpinga bushland (bark, eucalypts, grass tree etc) as not distinct or seperate from me but rather as beings which matter to me and are a world (a bushland) of which I am a part. A being-in-the-world prior to any
subject-object relation.
Or say, provide a different conception of truth to the indexical correspondent one, which is the traditional understanding of truth in photography.