film – Thought Factory

Anthropocene, film, roadside, South Australia, trees, walking

Roadside

August 15, 2024

I have just re-discovered a fragmentary roadside project that has been going for a while in the background. It emerged whilst walking down the back country roads in my local area of Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula with the standard poodles in the early morning or the late afternoon. I had started to notice the roadside vegetation, its poor condition and its decline and I then started photographing it off and on. It became a collection of individual photographs.

It was only when I was going through the black and white archives on the iMac that I re-discovered this roadside project. The early archival photos for the Roadside project were black and white:

The focus of the project is the two sides of the road — ie., the public area that runs between the fenced, private agricultural land on either side of the road. So there is no trespassing on private property.

Roadside has affinities with, and refers back to, Joyce Evans’ black and white project entitled Edge of the Road that was made in the 1980/1990s and was exhibited at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne in 2013. Joyce Evans’ project was concerned about the edge of the road and with the lack of control and the potential of chance using the Widelux F7 35mm panoramic camera’s inherent capabilities to image the minutiae of the world. Evans says that using “the camera’s capacity to see detail, which in the 60th of a second of the firing of the shutter my subconscious may perceive, but may not fully know.” Her concern is with the power of the edge of the image to relate to what was not shown in the image. What is shown by Evans in this threshold space of the edge of the road are booted footprints, barbed wire, gravel roads, dustbins, tyre tracks, hub caps, cigarette butts, spiders home, an intruding foot, and the fecund compost under snow laden ferns.

Japan, urban, walking

The Basho walk: starting

June 23, 2024

In late 2023 Suzanne and I spent 3-4 weeks in Japan during their autumn. Autumn is an inbetween time: summer is over and winter near. We had time in Tokyo, Morioka and Osaka as well as doing 2 walks: a Basho walk from Sendai to Yamadera and the Kumano Kodo pilgrim walk from Yuasa to Shingu. The Bashō walking tour,which started in Sendai, took place after we’d spent 5 days in Shinjuku, Tokyo and 3 days in Morioka.

The Bashō walking tour followed part of Matsuo Bashō’s third major journey to the north of Honshu. He sold his house in Fukagawa, Edo (now Tokyo) before he started travelling in 1689 with Kawai Sora, his travel companion for the most part, who also wrote a diary. Bashō and Sora travelled on foot about ten miles a day for about 5 months. The journey was approximately 720 miles and there were some 40 stations and stops on the journey through northern and central Honshu. Bashō returned to Edo in the winter of 1681 to a new house that was built for him. His travel sketch of that journey, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is a blend of prose and haiku.

Bashō and Sora entered the Tōhoku region of northern Honshu after walking 200 miles and they entered the city of Sendai in May 1689. This was Station 18. They stayed for several days before going to the scenic pine covered Matsushima islands via the town of Shiogama. Whilst in Sendai they were taken on a sightseeing tour of the area by a wood block artist and owner of a bookstore whom Basho identifies as Kaemon.Whereas Basho saw fields of bush clover, hills covered in blooming white rhododendrons, and dark pine woods I saw a large industrial city, the biggest in the Tōhoku region.

It was an overnight stay in Sendai as we arrived in the late afternoon and left the following morning for Matsushima. As my time for any exploratory urban photography was in the late afternoon before the tour briefing and dinner and early in the morning before breakfast I was limited to walking around the area near the hotel.

film, Japan, street, Tokyo

photographing on the streets in Japan

April 11, 2024

Prior to going on the Basho and the Kumano Kodo pilgrim walks I decided to spend some time in the early morning walking the streets in Japan (initially the lively lanes in Shinjuku, Tokyo, then Morioka and Sendai) to make photographs. This was one way to cross the cultural barriers. A photographic layer of this photographic walking was using an old Leica M4 rangefinder and black and white film (Kodak Tmax 400) to supplement the much more versatile digital Sony A7R 111 camera. This connection to modernity’s technologically archaic past helped me to feel at “home” in the global mega city whilst avoiding being the free-floating, postmodern tourist.

I wanted to connect to, or link up with, the postwar Japanese black and white film street photography in the late twentieth century: — eg., Shōmei Tōmatsu, Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira — with its candid, spontaneous sunappu images that was broadened by Ishiuchi Miyako and Takeda Hana, and continued with Yasuhisa Toyohara and Ohnishi Mitsugu in the 1980s. My images are a very marginal relationship to this tradition. The classic practitioners, such as Daido Moriyama, and Shōmei Tōmatsu lived in Shinjuku, viewed photography as a way of life, saw themselves either as vagabonds wandering the city streets aimlessly or as stray dogs hunting in the dark alleys of Shinjuku,and produced the short-lived left-wing magazine Provoke (1968–1969).

Though photography has a long historical connection to the city I was only a tourist staying in Shinjuku for 5 days aimlessly wandering amongst its maze of obscure lanes, bars and eating places.

film, light, water

light

March 15, 2024

The image below is a continuation of the little experiment that I’d started a couple of years ago to photograph light itself. At this stage I am not sure whether the experiment will evolve into a series.

This is early morning light over the sea at Encounter Bay looking to the right of Wright Island across to the Coorong. It is from the winter of 2022, and it was made whilst I was walking along Jetty Rd from Rosetta Head in Victor Harbor on a poodlewalk with Kayla. The image was made with Franke & Heidecke’s archaic and retro Rolleiflex TLR camera.

abstraction, critical writing, film, water

Encounter Bay seascapes

April 14, 2023

I have been looking at some recent scans of the seascapes that I made during 2022 with my vintage RolleiflexF TLR. This is a 60 year old camera and so it is no surprise that the elements of its Planar 75m lens that were joined with balsam glue have recently separated. Apparently the issue of lens separation is often associated with the camera having been exposed to high heat situations during its life. It can be repaired through baking the lens to de-glue the elements, but there is a risk of the elements cracking from the baking process. I decided to go ahead with the repair.

The 2022 seascape images that I made with this Rolleiflex TLR looked quite different to what I’d expected. From the traditional perspective of the quality of the image that is produced by a digital camera you could say that these are degraded images and so failures. That is how I saw them when I’d scanned the negatives and then compared them in Lightroom to the digital images made at the same time. I had initially thought that the degraded images resulted from the lens being salt damaged like the Leica M4-P due to by a rogue wave sweeping over me — but it was lens separation not a salt ladened camera.

I put the scans to one side and forgot about them. Some time later I went back and re-looked at Gustave Le Gray’s mid-19th century coastal photography of Normandy and the western coast of the Mediterranean. I concentrated on his seascapes, that were made using the wet-collodion process and from different negatives (one for the sea and another one for the sky) being combined to produce an image that showed both sky and sea in one unified, double-structured picture. He produced an album of sepia brown toned seascapes of albumen prints called Vistas del Mar. These are images from the prehistory of an instantaneous photography, or pictorial instantaneity, which emerged after 1878.

I found these images created by the combination of two different negatives taken at different moments with different exposure times stunning. They also raised the issues of how does photography represent time? How does photography figure the temporal nature of the medium? What kind of philosophy of time, if any, can be found in photography?

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