I have spent quite some  time walking  in  the local Waitpinga bushland this autumn.  I walked with Maya on the morning walk and with Maleko on the afternoon walk. Whilst being preoccupied with dipping my toes into making  walking art I noticed  the dead leaves hanging from the branches of the eucalypts as well as the bark. 

 I'd ignored them up to now as  I had been primarily focused on the bark with a 35mm film camera. The leaves were concealed -- merged into the background.  In the last couple of weeks of walking I started to look at the dead leaves as I walked past them. Their speckled brownness   stood out from  the background  world of green.  I started to  photograph them closeup.   

What emerged was  the  simple awareness of something present-at-hand in its sheer presence-at-hand. The seeing involved in the encounter with the present-at-hand gives precedence to the entity and it does so precisely because it detaches itself from the background context. The emergence of the dead leaves  into presence can be understood as an event of the un-concealment of the dead leaves  out of concealment. The photography discloses this coming into presence. 

The hanging dead leaves  are very ephemeral  as they lose their colour, fall  to the ground from the coastal winds,  and  decay with the winter rains. They suggest  the transience of the things  and  the “pathos” (aware) of “things” (mono), deriving from their transience.  The photography  stabilises the flux or the transience in the image.

What emerges is a  photography as a self-questioning that involved critically reflecting on the horizontal limits of photography's own cultural tradition. Photographing these humble dead leaves is a de-centering  that aims to deconstruct a Euro-centric notion of  landscape photographic/wilderness  aesthetics  that is common in Australia whilst recognising other non-Western traditions of aesthetics. In this case it is a turn to Japanese aesthetics which  involves a translation of mono no aware. Hence the dead leaves rather than cherry blossom. 

Rather than this turn being another beginning,  this perspective and interpretation  is a challenging of boundaries not erasing them. It is an in-betweenness that presuppose the existence of different changing and continuous aesthetic traditions. It is  an  inter-cultural middle ground that aims to unearth modes of photography -- eg., poiesis -- that have been marginalized or forgotten since the advent of modernist photography. The marginalized “other” is not utilized to dislodge the modern self-understanding of landscape photography but to point at its blind spots.