A detail in the coastal rock that I'd noticed whilst on a poodle walk. I would pass it by every time we walked to Dog Beach. It recalled the abstract modernist photographers ---eg., Aaron Siskind--- associated with the abstract expressionist movement.
Siskind emphasize the modernist concern with the flatness of the picture plane and his approach to picture making emphasised close-up framing, as well as an emphasis on texture, line, and visual rhymes to creating abstract images of found objects in the real world.
Siskin developed new techniques to photograph details and fragments of ordinary, commonplace materials. This radical new work transformed Siskind’s image-making from straight photography to abstraction, from documentation to expressive art. His concern with shape, line, gesture, and the picture plane prompted immediate comparison with abstract expressionist painting, particularly with the art of Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell.
Had similar work been done in Australia or South Australia during the 1950s and 1960s I wondered. If so, what had happened to it because I'd never seen anything like a photographic interpretation of the abstract expressionism of a Barrett Newman or Adolph Gottlieb.