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M-A APO 50 ADOX Color Implosion

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Edited by Ernest
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Hasseblad Xpan cropped, 45mm, TMax 400, HC-110(H)

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Edited by dimm
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On ‎1‎/‎25‎/‎2021 at 3:22 PM, stray cat said:

big white cloud ii 2020

m2, 35mm summaron, yellow filter, xp2 super

I have taken the liberty to shuffle these images into an unredacted file tentatively entitled "Echoes: Presence of Absence."

Dangerous! Yes, it is dangerous looking at these photographs that signal a very coherent aesthetic in light of the presence of absence. The danger lies not only in the attribute that these photographs open pathways to reframe an aesthetic, but they eat time. They spur voracious ideas that dismantle the received notion of what constitutes the margins of an image. The given, with its beginnings and endings unstated, characterizes an image as a shard of time, a fragment. It is a fragment that initiates the quest for closure, meaning, yet simultaneously disallows that closure. It poses the tension of affirming a sense of wholeness, which extends beyond the margins of the image, at the same time it denies that wholeness. In this way it alludes to a sense of completion it can never fulfill. The vogue of ruins, architectural and sculptural, captured the attention of artists and poets in the 18th century and was a notable aesthetic of 19th-century British Romanticism. The Greek marble sculptures that Lord Elgin added to the inventory of the British Museum, for example, were the subject of Keats's sonnet, "On Seeing Elgin Marbles." Both the sculpture and the poem are fragments that invite completion in the imagination of the viewer/reader.

Defining "presence of absence" in photography often cites the object of ruin or ruins themselves. But the presence of absence can include an allusion of something beyond the margin of the photograph, what the image suggests as life or idea constructed or completed in the imagination.

We read "big white cloud ii" from left to right, but there's tension in the woman and the elements of the cloud, the grass, and the sand reading from right to left. A solitary figure in a shoreline setting with sand and all those footprints, yet no one in sight. The tension of bright sun and isolation. The clouds move, the grass moves, the sand is history of movement, but the figure is stationary. Antonioni speaks here in the silence of the moment. We wait and invent what happens. The absence. Where is the ruin? Is it a psychological ruin? Just reflection as the mind wanders? Contours of presence of absence.

 

On ‎1‎/‎27‎/‎2021 at 2:07 PM, stray cat said:


hospital 2020

m2, 35mm summaron, yellow filter, xp2 super

Decisive, incisive, yet there's a single plant in shadow. Flat windows, precisionist, perhaps even cubist. Where's the signature of individuality? One window shade against a stainless sky.

On ‎1‎/‎28‎/‎2021 at 1:37 AM, stray cat said:

shrubbery 2021

m6ttl, 50mm, ektar

The 18th century defined the aesthetic of the Picturesque, "wild nature" and "nature tamed.' Here, nature is tamed, but it's a cityscape pregnant with potential. The artificiality of two little trees trimmed into leafy balls in counterpoint to two poles lining a vacant city street, save the advertising photographs of models, two groups of three men and women. Antonioni's The Eclipse.

On ‎2‎/‎3‎/‎2021 at 2:54 AM, stray cat said:

toilet block 2021

m6ttl, 35mm summaron, yellow filter, tri-x

Difficult and disjunctive arcs underscore the diaphanous puff of a cloud, while the slice of trees play against the angle of concrete architectural wall. How can time be fixed? Is this the only signature of habitants? The tension of form. Orchestrated conflict.

On ‎2‎/‎3‎/‎2021 at 3:23 AM, stray cat said:

movie still (The Dry) 2021

m6ttl, 35mm summaron, yellow filter, tri-x

A moment, a movie, does her name start with an "M"? Backward glancing, right to left. Memory presence. The effect of slight over-exposure on the past. Her hair plays in the wind, animating.

On ‎2‎/‎3‎/‎2021 at 6:17 PM, stray cat said:

urban beautification, dandenong 2021

m6ttl, 35mm summaron, yellow filter, tri-x

The margin mandates construction of the sign, given its shadow footprint. And the little forest, the 18th-century forest, tamed nature. So much a theatre for traffic, yet there's no one. The population eliminated and only the shadow of a sign echoed faintly by a manhole cover.

On ‎2‎/‎3‎/‎2021 at 10:24 PM, stray cat said:

nonsense verse 2021

m6ttl, 35mm summaron, yellow filter, tri-x

Fragmentation. Is it a motorcycle? Are we too close to Antonioni's Blow-Up to make sense of the shards of letters, white on white, so much white, and the hidden jungle hiding in shadow. Just what jungles do.

On ‎2‎/‎4‎/‎2021 at 5:09 PM, stray cat said:

the phantom phives 2021

m6ttl, 35mm summaron, yellow filter, tri-x

 

Aptly titled and scary as hell. Surely, it must have been 666.

On ‎2‎/‎4‎/‎2021 at 10:41 PM, stray cat said:

wrecker's yard 2021

m6ttl, 35mm summaron, yellow filter, tri-x

Pandemic repository, junk tire mosquito condos.

On ‎2‎/‎6‎/‎2021 at 1:19 AM, stray cat said:

dandenong 2021

m6ttl, 35mm summicron, yellow filter, tri-x

I will come back to this one because it is too frightful, even with just a pencil, to admit. It doesn't go without saying, to drive home the double negative, how pivotal the number 2 is in this people's evidence: two poles (one a warning cone?), the number 2 on the telephone pole, two high tension poles over the corrugated steel fence, two primary cloud patches, two white lines in the sidewalk. I don't want to know what's on the other side of this institutional fence? I want to know. What is that cone doing in the middle of the sidewalk? Footnote to dystopia? This hard black shadow in the foreground? No, noir. Where's the electricity going? Dandenong? Too frightful. I don't want to know. I want to know. Presence of absence. Silence by John Cage.

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M-A APO 50 ADOX Color Implosion

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16 hours ago, Ernest said:

Newspeak
M-A Thambar-M CS  ADOX Color Implosion
The latest news outlet.

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A telling photograph and a haunting message.

16 hours ago, Ouroboros said:

Orkney.

Fuji GX617

SWD 90mm

Delta 100 in DDX

3 stop nd

Heliopan 22

 

Superb photograph. Masterly composition, just enough movement from the water to provide the drama and sumptuous tonality.

14 hours ago, dimm said:

 

Drawing on surfboard, 2021

M2-R | Summaron-M 35mm f/3.5 | Arista Edu Ultra 100 | Rodinal 1:50 

Love this, the artwork on the board and just enough of her materials and sea to seal the context.

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All together now!    [Silvermax]

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Winter walk #4

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MP,  Summarit 35; PanF, Rodinal

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Snow Scene Abstract

Agfa Isolette III / Delta 400 / Xtol

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Rockville MD, Leica IIIf Elmar 5cm K400 Ilfosol3, scanned neg

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