I have been calling many of the rock abstracts that I have made whilst walking along the coast between Petrel Cove and Kings Head granite, when they should be termed Kanmantoo. These Kanmantoo group rocks are typically derived from the Cambrian Period sedimentation in shallow ocean.
According to the Coastal Landscape of South Australian text these Cambrian metasedimentary rocks are aligned with the Encounter Fault, occur northeast of Newland Head, diminishing in height towards King's Head and the Bluff (Rosetta Head). The small pocket beaches, largely derived from erosion of Permian glacial deposits, occupy bays eroded into less resistant Cambrian rocks.
Diarmund Costello observes there is a breadth of photographic abstraction, which comes in a wide variety of shades and strengths. He classifies the variety as a typology of proto-abstraction, faux-abstraction, constructed faux abstraction, weak abstraction, strong abstraction, constructed abstraction and concrete abstraction. Costello's argument is that what is often generically typed as “abstract photography” is a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon that comes in many forms.
Costello describes weak abstraction thus: it
"records the world in such a way as to no longer give rise to a clear experience of seeing figurative content or volumentric form. Weakly abstract photographs home in on some corner of the world, an alignment of edges or surfaces that can, when isolated by the viewfinder of a camera, be photographed in such a way as to generate an abstract or quasi-abstract composition. We may not be sure that we are seeing some corner of the world, or be able to make out what it is if we do, though we always are."
Examples include Aaron Siskind’s well known images of walls of peeling paint, ripped fly posters, and crumbling plaster surfaces in routinely included in surveys of abstract photography, despite the fact that it is generally clear what such images depict.
