Thoughtfactory: abstractions

developing the tradition of photographic abstraction

Kanmantoo abstract #1

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. 

Costello says that a  faux-abstraction, in contrast, consists chiefly of various strategies of estrangement and defamiliarization that isolate objects from their everyday environments, or frame them in such a way as to delay or frustrate recognition of what one is looking at.