At present, the intent of my practice is to develop a personal aesthetic, emotional and political relationship with the places which I visit by interacting with them by walking and photographing. My technical strategy is to walk around a site in a semi-organised manner, having plotted an idea for a route, and then allowing myself to become distracted and deviate from this as I come across places, objects and views which attract my attention. I photograph these on the fly. I follow personal preferences for photographing traces of human and animal activity, abstracts such as reflections and organic patterns, viewpoints, and idiosyncratic details such as radio masts and ruins. I use a 24-70mm lens to accommodate these different types of shot and have recently upgraded my camera to one with a larger sensor to better record natural textures such as bracken, leaves and heather.

At present, these are intended to communicate the sense of place as it appears to me. I shoot a large number of photographs and present only the best. These communicate sense of place effectively to others, judging from their feedback. As such, and at present, my chosen strategies are successful. As the project is still in its explorative stage, once refined, the intention will become more defined and the strategies narrowed accordingly. Images will also sit with text, which I have not begun to include as yet.

While I can appreciate manipulated photography, I rarely find a connection to it. Gaudrillot-Roy’s ongoing series is a rare example. His work doesn’t so much capture the eeriness of the mundane, as coaxes it out. There’s always something slightly eerie about quiet streets in the dead of night, a sense of the unreal, and Gaudrillot-Roy makes this manifest by stripping away the buildings and adding new details, while maintaining a superlative command of line, tone and colour. The images are like pages from a children’s fantasy book, and defy any kind of logic, but rather communicate in an emotive, imaginative way.

They might be playful, but there’s also a sense of anxiety, even terror – where have all the people gone to? Am I, the viewer, all alone in this strange world? Has there been a strange apocalypse, or am I seeing the world as it always has been, the world of families and jobs and bars an illusion I’m seeing through for the first time?

A social message could be drawn from this, but I suspect this is of lesser importance to the image than the communication of mood and the injunction to imagine. Certainly, this is the impression one gets from Gaudrillot-Roy’s commentary.

This week’s reflection tasks asks me to position my practice in relationship to this work. I cannot. I have neither the technical skills nor the inclination to adopt such strategies. As a photographer also interested in the eerie, however, it is interesting to see how a photograph can be used as a starting point for further development.

http://www.zachariegaudrillot-roy.com/en/portfolio-20289-0-40-facades-3.html

My practice hasn’t really moved on since last week, and I haven’t found this week’s learning, although interesting, especially relevant. I’m not much interested in questions of truth or the peculiar nature of the photographic medium. Rather, I’m interested in photography as a way by which I can engage with and interpret the world can reveal a set of truths – provisional ones of course, as truth is always thus. I’m interested in photography as methodology.

Through being forced to consider communicating meaning, I find I’ve come back to where I was in later Spring last year, beginning to understand the essay form in documentary film – a thinking through of ideas, a gleaning and sifting of materials, a self-conscious testing out of notions and practices. This is why this week’s materials haven’t been terribly productive for me – everything is much too, albeit necessarily, up in the air. Ask me these questions again some time, and I’ll most likely have some answers. I’m using my camera as a form of thinking, so let me think some more and I’ll get back to you.

As for contexts – I’m thinking book, or possibly article, or possibly both. I want my work to exist in dialogue with text, certainly, and I’m keen to escape the increasingly oppressive omnipresence of the screen somehow. I’m also keen to use sensory ethnography as a methodology, and some of the opportunities opening out at the Pebblebed Heaths will lend themselves to this. I continue to explore geography in connection with this, and am also learning about landscape art more broadly. But it’s all very early days, I don’t have anything specific to say beyond that.

Taxonomies are tricky, paradoxical creatures. They both open up and shut down conversation, make sense and nonsense. I hate them and love them in equal measure, but find them indispensable in developing thinking. I can see that Szarkowski’s might be useful, so here’s my attempt at applying it to one of my most recent shots of Woodbury Common. 

The thing here is the track. It’s easily recognisable. We can see it’s a track through countryside, that both people and vehicles use it, that it comes from somewhere and goes somewhere and without considering the ambient conditions, it’s a very ordinary track indeed and that very ordinariness imparts a sense of familiarity. It’s the kind of track anyone might come to know. 

The detail here, its ‘truth’ is those tracks. Not only do they animate the image and give it the dramatic lines, but they’re somewhat brutal. They remind the viewer that, even in such a beautiful setting, noise and management and people are at work: there is nothing ‘natural’ here. A narrative is – perhaps – suggested through the absent activity, and I would question Szarkowski’s assertion that photos don’t tell stories – that they are so frequently used to prompt them in creative writing workshops and therapy sessions suggests that any narrative absence is paradoxically an overabundance of possibilities. 

The time here is a frosty morning. I’d chosen to be here to capture exactly this – the reddish light, the elegant blue frost tints. But it’s also, on a longer scale, the intensive heathland management practice of scraping topsoil which requires the heavy machinery. It’s also – implicitly – the time it took to make those tracks. Coming from a film background, which records time in a very different kind of way, I’m increasingly finding photography a much more supple and subtle way of registering time, and one that more actively engages the audience through inference. 

Likewise, through segmenting the actual, the frame infers what cannot be perceived visually, and in this photography and film are very similar. It’s through frame that the previous elements – thing, detail and time – become arranged into an animate whole. It’s also through frame that this becomes very much my shot – I wasn’t the only one out on the common that morning taking photos of tracks and frost – but the way I’ve arranged the track, the gorse, the sky, to create a slightly dramatic, slightly abstract image is wholly mine. This is precisely, as Szarkowski says, ‘to quote out of context’. 

Vantage point, the final characteristic, is an unusual one here for me. As I wanted to include the distant trees, I lifted my camera as high over my head as I could reach to take the shot. I’m not sure that comes across, however, and it was a purely aesthetic rather than thematic choice. That being the case, the vantage point appears to be – even if it actually isn’t – at about head high walking amongst landscape. It’s not in flight through a zoom, picking out a detail crouching down and scrutinising. The vantage point is that of a walker, any walker, out enjoying the morning, and this gives emphasis to the ordinariness of the scene and the track. The extraordinary – the frost, the morning sun – thus becomes accessible, commonplace, within the democratic realms of ordinary experience. 

Szarkowski, J. 2007. The Photographer’s Eye. New York: The Museum of Modern Art.