The modest abstractures below were made whilst walking along the coastal rocks west of Dep's Beach with Maya on a  late  afternoon  poodlewalk.They are  part of a series  (the blog posts are now a notebook) as the photos  do not typically reward attention as particulars, but rather as members of a group or a series of  photographic abstractions.

I am struggling to find material on this form of abstraction understood as imagery that has been ‘abstracted’ from nature. In the visual arts abstraction is understood in modernist terms--which presupposed the specificity of the arts ( painting,  sculpture etc) and their purity. Abstraction in modernism is the divergence from representation, figuration and narrative.  Whilst abstraction in painting stood for a  purely autonomous, autotelic art and a universally legible language, photographic abstraction is usually seen as decoration -- a splash of colour and cheap profundity for the boardroom or bedroom. 

That much is well known. The difficulty I'm encountering is going beyond this 20th century art history to rethink photographic abstraction in the 21st century. The puzzle is: what is abstraction’s contemporary artistic meaning and significance beyond rejecting realism and the parochialism of the figure/ground distinction or returning to  or rescuing abstraction from its obsolesence, as the   familiar, wholesome, and spiritually nourishing in reaction to the Global Financial Crisis. 

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A recent addition to an  ongoing series:

I have to admit that I have walked past this particular tree many times whilst walking with Maya. I didn't see the colours or the shape of the orange.  How come I missed it so many times? I wasn't looking obviously. 

This photo was made in the summer of 2024. The location is  around the western corner of   Petrel Cove on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. It was the late afternoon to avoid the bright light of the summer sun.  

The dried out salt depends on high tides, no sand cover,  and the summer heat to evaporate the seawater in the rock pools during the day.  Outside of summer there are  the various rock pools that do not evaporate.  

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.  

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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.

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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. 

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 Made whilst  wandering in the local Waitpinga bushland on a poodlewalk in  the late summer of 2022.  

 It was a branch of a pink gum, but I  can no longer remember where it was exactly. 

These colours in the local bushland in Waitpinga caught my eye whilst I was walking through it:

This macro  of the  bark of  pink gum was made whilst I was on a poodlewalk with Kayla. This was  in  late February. It is a continuation of the kind of abstraction from nature series here and here. 

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. 

This is a bit of iron that I saw  lying on the ground when I was on a recent early morning  poodlewalk with Kayla. The iron was laying on the beach amongst the seagrass, and it was  from  the rebuilding of the causeway to Granite Island that had been happening  during 2021.

 It had been raining that morning. The sky was still heavily overcast and so I did not need to take account of the early morning sunlight shining directly onto the iron.  

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