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.
I wanted to move beyond the conventional understanding of pictorial abstraction in the visual arts as being non-depictive or non figurative; ie.,this is interpreted as a picture being abstract when one can no longer see any recognizably three-dimensional objects in it. This condition rules out perception of three-dimensional objects on pain of collapsing back into figuration. This traditionally has been what abstraction has been in art history.
Rather than think historically -- what abstraction has been as defined by exhibition catalogues and books, which work with the narrow art theoretical notion of abstraction as a lack of figuration -- could we not think conceptually?
Could we then interpret abstraction differently to the absence of depiction? Could there be a different interpretation along the lines of a restricted form of depiction? This could be one in which there is an experience of seeing spatial relations — notably relations of depth between planes, colours or lines — in a flat surface, but not volumetric forms or everyday objects.