I realised that my low key approach to the local Fleurieu landscape has been one of immersion or absorption within the remnant scrub. An example of this kind of crafting of the image:
This is at odds with the detached, disembodied neutral observer with an objective and ahistorical vision--what is known as Cartesian perspectivalism----which has been common in, or central to, mainstream photographic discourse. This perspectvalism or visual regime combines the Renaissance notions of perspective with the Cartesian ideas of a disembodied, subjective rationality in which the eye and its gaze are foundationally allied with transparency, operating as the abstract vanishing point of Renaissance perspective. Subjective rationality underpins photography.
This visual regime emphasised photography's capacity for objectivity on the basis of its independence from the body: meaning objectively captured resides in the photographic image where it is a universally legible. This visual regime is premised on the equation of seeing and knowing, in that its technology enabled the purification of both the gaze and the image from the contaminations and seductions to which they were otherwise prey.
In modernism the positivist continuity of seeing and knowing is disrupted by the awareness of the subjective mediations of embodied visuality--the subjective character of the gaze and image. This results in the emergence of an interior vision or gaze focused on the interiority of the individual subject and an inner truth. What stays firm with the modernist turn to a romantic subjective imagination is the positivist conception of the camera's optical fidelity and the purity of the image.