During the Covid-19 lockdown I have been photographing in my local area: mostly exploring and photographing  within a few kilometres from our home in Encounter Bay.   The photography has included  both digital and film. 

The emphasis has been on  the film work--initially  medium  format,  then large format--- so that I am able to  participate in an online exhibition of film photography  hosted by the Friends of Photography Group in Melbourne.This  is  an exhibition of  film photos made during the lockdown.

Abstraction is usually seen as a removal, or a paring away.It is an abstraction from something, or stripping away the context. This is  usually seen as a moving away from figuration and representation, and with Formalist modernism  (Greenberg)  also a moving away from other media (literature and narrative). The modernist desire/drive  is for a purity of  art forms expressed in terms of specificity of pure visuality and painterly form. 

This  repression of literature to achieve purity in the specific medium of painting through erecting a wall or grid (Ie., Rosalind Krauss) between the arts of vision and the arts  of language  collapses with the shift to post-mediums and the intermingling of media.

  Abstraction is seen as obsolete--as belonging to the cultural history of the twentieth century that is now behind us where it was associated with experimental art, the avant-garde overturning tradition, cubism, abstract expressionism etc.