Over time, this minor weblog has evolved  from being  a Leica snapshot blog into one  about visual poetics in photography. Based on using a 1980s  film Leica rangefinder camera  this  approach  stands in contrast to the Leica being associated with, and traditionally used for,  photojournalism and urban street photography in the 20th century.  Recall black-and-white and Henri  Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank  or Lee Friedlander.  

My  equipment is simple: a hand held  Leica  M4-P camera,  a standard Leica 50mm Summicron lens, a basic handheld lightmeter,  and Kodak Portra 400 ASA film  with  the negatives  processed  in C41 by a commercial lab and then scanned by me using a  little Plustek  Opticfilm 8100 scanner. The post processing, which  is done in Adobe  Lightroom  6, is minimal.  It is basic technology with the construction  of the image is done in camera. 

This image of the Balcanoona shearing shed in  the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges National Park in South Australia when  I was there in the winter of 2021,  is an example of my approach.      

Though I struggle  to make poetic images I  often wondered what poetic photography  means,  or refers to.   People usually say that poetics is the opposite of documentary and that it is a  form of  art photography and so  distinct from photojournalism. That doesn't get us very far since  it just identifies a genre of photography that is deemed to be experimental and  outside the constrictions  and the traditional structures of photography. 

Photography  is the key medium of the moment, the only one keeping up with, and indeed driving, our  fast-forward digital-social media-culture. Ours is the age of the visual.  So what is poetics in art photography in the accelerated culture of the internet and Facebook? Clearly it is not  photopoetry,  ie.,  the pairing of poetry and photography,  despite both mediums  conveying an  experience of heightened perception or an intensity of looking/feeling. An example of this  is Remains of Elmet, a poetic  and photographic lament for the loss of a way of life in Yorkshire's Calder Valley by Ted Hughes and Fay Godwin.

We can also put to one side the traditional conception of poetics as  an inquiry into the conventions  and principles that underlie a  work of art, whose roots are in Aristotle's Poetics? Or the Russian Formalists, New Criticism, and structuralism? That is philosophy and literary theory. Is it  then the poetic use of visual language as opposed to the ordinary use?  If so,  then it refers to describing a photography as poetic.

There is a movement of poetic photography that has emerged in the last 15 years and is distinctive for juxtaposition, languid beauty and visual ambiguity. The images  appear ambiguous with diverse meanings.  Susan Hill, the curator of Quite Moments: Contemporary Poetic Photography  (2015) exhibition at the Freemantle Arts Centre  says that this visual ambiguity  encourages a viewer  to imagine and create a prehistory or story for the images.

A  starting point to unpack this would be the Jena Romantics as they developed  a mode  of creativity embodied in the figure of the romantic genius. This mode  opposed  the objective explication of laws inherent in the work of art and was  against the traditional conception of poetics concerned with the  inner logic  of a work of art through  an examination of its formal and constituent features.  The Jena Romantics were deeply concerned with the relationship between form and content particularly in the works of  the Schlegel brothers, and they postulated feeling, the  imagination  and genius as superior to classical form and  scientific rationality.

So we have individual subjectivity, imagination  and feeling without  the attempt to replace reason with faith, sensation, unconstrained feeling or intuition. Instead, the Jena Romantics  bring out the rationality of the passions and the passionate nature of reason. Reason without feeling is empty and feeling without reason is blind. Romantic poetry transcends the boundaries of a particular genre and the literary as it is creative and reflective power that reflects on the conditions of its own possibility and the conditions of  finite existence.

This give us a brief  account of the characteristics of art in modernity as individuality expressed through originality.  Visual ambiguity emerges with the Jena Romantics idea of fragment and  irony as the form of the art work.  Irony renders the meaning of the fragment unstable and incomplete. When it does establish a positive meaning it overturns it through the way it is stated, then overturns this again. 

The constant  back and forth movement of continual  change  that undercuts all fixed positions when linked to the juxtaposition of  image  fragments  gives rise to visual ambiguity