Thoughtfactory’s Notebooks: experiments + journeys

brief notes on

Posts for Tag: Zeiss-Ikon Contaflex S

blurred realities

Blurriness -- in the sense of blurred realities --- is in opposition  to the clear,  distinct   pictures of reality that emphasis clarity. 

For instance, Wittgenstein  in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus  appeals to clarity when he  characterises the aim, task and results of philosophy. The task for philosophy is to make thoughts clear; whilst making a thought clear is making clear a picture of reality. 

Analogue photography's representations were traditionally seen capturing  a slice of real life in terms of the conventions of   clarity  and sharpness.  Photographic realism was interpreted as faithfully representing  the reality of the material world--a framed, cut-out of reality.  Representing was understood in terms of   clarity  with clarity  interpreted as depicting  (abbilden in Wittgenstein) which was then interpreted as mirroring  or copying. Photographic theory from Bazin, Benjamin, Barthes, Berger, Sjarkowski, up until the mid-1970s was in general preoccupied with the documentary and the vernacular. 

 In contrast, Claude  Monet's Water Lilies have a blurry, out-of-focus effect that characterises the wide stretches of water. This aspect of Monet’s later work was an actual aesthetic choice, and rather than being a loss of distinctiveness, the indistinct   can be interpreted in terms of the aesthetic category of blurriness. Blurriness as an out of focus aesthetic is associated with the transitory, contingency,  disorder, movement, incompleteness, ambiguity, the indeterminate, the indistinct, the poetic, the formless. 

Nostalgic Pleasures #5: visual thinking

Old rocks, old camera,  old film, deep history,  visual thinking.  Stepping outside of,  or exceeding the limit of, the  established  horizon, border and  parergon  of nostalgic pleasures. 

A previous Nostalgic Pleasures #3 post outlined the  background to  my  experiment in a minor key using 35mm expired Fuji Velvia 50 film  and a 1960's Zeiss-Ikon Contaflex Super SLR camera.The  continuation of  the  experiment involved replacing  both the Fuji Velvia 50  with Fuji Pro 400H colour negative and  the Zeiss 35mm Pro-Tessar lens  with the Pro-Tessar 85mm lens  on the Contaflex.  

The gifted Fuji Pro 400H  is expired  because the  film was introduced in 2004 and discontinued in 2021.  Fortunately,  the 85mm pro-Tessar lens, which has been generously loaned to me,  does not suffer from the key problem of  the front elements separating,  due to the early optical cement that Zeiss used deteriorating, resulting in a sort of "rainbow" appearance behind the front element. So I could experiment and explore the unstable boundaries of nostalgic pleasure by experimenting  with photographing  the coastal rocks in my local area.  Hopefully this probing would generate  some possibilities  for a more conceptually orientated large format photography. 

nostalgic pleasures #4

The previous post entitled  Nostalgic Pleasures #3 gives the  background to  my  experiment in a minor key  of using 35mm expired Fuji Velvia 50 film  and a 1960's Zeiss-Ikon Contaflex Super SLR camera.  The  picture  below was made whilst I was wandering  in the area around   Bunjils Cave  in the Black Range Scenic Reserve, adjacent to  the Grampians (Gariwerd) in Victoria  in the  late afternoon in spring.  

The photography that day was chance encounters in a rugged, harsh  and messy  landscape, which  had a history of being burnt from bushfires and with a probable future of becoming warmer and drier:  increasing dryness with more  hotter days  (greater than 35°C) whilst the spells of warmer temperatures will last longer. The climate models indicate that the temperatures will increase by  1.9°C----2.5°C by around mid-century. 

nostalgic pleasures #3

The picture below is a  second  example of using  expired Fuji Velvia 50 with a Zeiss-Ikon Contaflex Super SLR  and  a Zeiss  Pro-Tessar 35mm f3.2 lens.  The  film  was processed in E-6 chemistry at an Adelaide lab,  then scanned by me  using an Epson V850 Pro flatbed scanner with Silverfast software. The  digital file was post-processed  in Adobe's  Lightroom   This analogue/digital combination makes it a hybrid. 

(Pitkin Rd, Waitpinga, 2024)

The picture was made in the late afternoon during the winter months whilst on a poodlewalk with Maleko and it is a part of the low key  Roadside project, which  is a work-in-process. Pitkin Rd  is a no through  local road in Waitpinga, in the souther Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia  and it leads to several small hobby (life style) farms.