This photo of an old pink gum log lying on the roadside next to the local Waitpinga bushland represented a significant moment for me as a photographer. It was a turning point in the practice of my large format photography, when I really was on the point of giving the 5x7 format away.
It was a a significant moment for several reasons. Firstly, this was when I started to consciously see nature (ie., the bush) in terms of change and transience. Nature was not unchanging or timeless (what has always been); nor was it purely a social or cultural construct. It has its own dynamical processes (eg., decay) even if I couldn't see the processes of things passing away and then them not being there any more.
Secondly, the image is significant because it was with the negative of this image that I finally figured out how to scan 5x7 colour negatives on a flatbed Epson scanner; and then to post process them in Lightroom to obtain a reasonable looking image. One that was other than beauty, and which avoided the problematic mystification of nature in environmental philosophy.
Thirdly, I connected to the Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi, whose emphasis on the acceptance of transience and imperfection, provided a counter to postmodernism in Australia. The characteristics of the wabi-sabi aesthetic include roughness, simplicity, economy, austerity, and modesty. History is a big part of wabi-sabi and the wearing needs to come with actual age and the influence of time. The presence of cracks, splintering and decay in things are considered to signify the passing of time and the weather.
Fourthly, this was when I understood Adorno's idea of natural history (Naturgeschichte) ie., nature, which appears timeless has a history and society which has a history as progress appears as natural or permanent. Natural history refers to a set of tense relationships between the opposed concepts of nature and history. History and nature are concepts that mutually and dialectically define one another, and can ‘flip’ into their other.
As mentioned above this was significant moment was a turning point. Transience, as a perspective, concentrates on the singular, wholly contingent fragment of historical experience that can be taken as ciphers or clues to some dimension of historical truth. The images produced by my large format photography are also contingent fragments. That left me with a problem of how to connect the various fragmentary images.
This is a problem I haven't really addressed. I don't know how to, apart from avoiding the modernist idea of a series. Serial art, as it was, called was based on the repetition of a standard unit or variations on a theme and its strategy was to challenge the assumption that the role of visual artists was to create special kinds of unique art objects.
More to come in a future post.