trunk abstract #4

The abstraction below was made whilst I was on a poodlewalk with Maya, our young standard poodle,  in  the local bushland in Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula  in South Australia early in  the  morning.

From memory  it had been raining overnight. It was in the mid-winter of  2023.  Maya would have been about 6 months old then, and it would have been a training walk. She was learning to stay  with me whilst we walked through the bushland. 

a b+w version

This  black and white version of an abstract rock formation near Petrel Cove is from the archives in 2019.

A colour version, which was posted in 2019,  is here.  

I have been starting to research and write about  photographic abstraction that moves beyond the modernist idea of abstraction as non-figuration of the mid-twentieth century. Whilst doing so I have been working my way  through the  archives. 

quartz abstraction #11

Whilst on the early  morning poodlewalk with Maya  along the littoral zone of the coastal rocks on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula I started scoping for a possible 5x4 photo session. As  Maya is now starting to hang around me whilist  I spend time photographing I reckoned it would be possible to use a 5x4 with a dark cloth. 

This is what I came up with today --- a close up, or macro view,  of an isolated rock with a quartz vein:

I had photographed the rock a few days earlier from a broader perspective.  

wood abstraction: a note

This is an abstraction of the  old,  wooden Granite Island causeway at Victor Harbor in South Australia.  

The causeway  was in such a bad condition that it could not be repaired.  It  has been dismantled and replaced by a concrete one.  There are just a few pieces left at both the Victor Harbor and Granite Island ends. They -- the heritage remnants -- appear to function as viewing platforms. 

No doubt, many  photographers would say this  picture is not  an abstraction.  Others would point to the formal design of the picture and say that it is formalist but not even a weak abstraction. So I wrote a brief post on abstraction on the thoughtfactory website in an effort to open up a space for the possibility of contemporary photographic abstractions.

quartz abstraction #10

I cannot remember the exact location of this macro photo of quartz and lichen that I constructed as an abstraction. It was made in  the late summer -- the digital file says  early February 2022. 

Looking at the surrounding files I can see that I would have been walking from Dep's Beach back to the car that would have been parked at Kings Beach lookout. It was made whilst on an afternoon poodlewalk as it was around 7pm. 

trunk abstract #3

I  recently needed  to fill in  3 or 4 more hours walking with the standard poodles around  the Adelaide parklands. This was  in mid-January 2022. 

 It was a warm day and we walked amongst the trees in and around Veale Gardens.  We moved slowly through the shady areas beneath  the trees  to fill in the time.  As we did so I made a series of photos of the trunks of the trees.

It was  a return to  what I used to do when I lived in the CBD prior to 2015 -- walking the poodles in the parklands and making photos.   Only this time  I wore a mask and kept  my distance from everyone because of  the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic is a game changer.    

colour

This abstraction from  a snapped pink gum branch in the local Waitpinga bushland   is from an early morning walk with Kayla  between Xmas and New Year.   It was made a bit latter on the same morning  as   this one. 

Several of the  branches of the pink gums in the bushland had cracked and snapped over the Xmas period. I wondered why as it had been a wet spring and the early summer months had been cool.   I had assumed that it was a period of extended dryness that caused the branches to snap or splinter.