This small book is a little wonder. Despite its small size, Between Dog and Wolf (2006) provides an utterly immersive experience into the various twilights of Finland, England, Belgium and Japan. This isn’t just because Lebas’ chosen format is the panorama, nor that the images often take up their entire pages, but particularly due to Lebas’ unashamed, even brazen, embrace of black. 

The series Blue Hour, included here, lingers in the same bluebell glade until only a few unidentifiable dots of colour break up the final shot. The viewer is made to strain, made to work, just as when faced with dying light. The known becomes abstract and slightly unsettling, the complexities of woodland reduced to vague structures. 

Even where the trees’ shapes are more defined – as with the snow series Between Dog and Wolf (a French term for twilight) – the presence of large dark patches, or dark borders, implies an encroaching darkness. Lebas leaves much of the perception of this work to the viewer’s imagination, a perfect analogy of twilight’s cultural heritage.

I have much to learn here. Digital photography permits an almost forensic analysis of light, details in the shadows unavailable to the naked eye unveiled through Lightroom. I often find this an irresistible temptation: to lift the leaves, bark and pebbles from obscurity is an act of discovery with a certain amount of childish delight attached to it. However, doing so does not necessarily make for images that communicate affect as effectively as Lebas fuzzy edges and jet black patches, and it’s affect that interests me the most – at least at present – working as I am with the end of the day. Just because my camera has recorded detail in the shadows should not dictate that I reveal it. I am already beginning to darken some images, plunging details back into obscurity and leaving sections of the images featureless for the viewer to make their own mind up about. 

It’s also worth mentioning that I find high summer a difficult time for me to photograph. I’m drawn to geometric structures and the profusion of dark texture makes branches, paths, and streams complex and dense. Through plunging them back into darkness, the forms, paradoxically, begin to emerge once more, while new shapes emerge in the diminished points of light which have struggled through the foliage. 

Lebas, C. 2006. Between Dog and Wolf. London: Azure Publishing. 

Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s writing has resonated across disciplines and his term topophilia, or love of place, has entered into relatively common parlance. Like other geographers I’m interested in, Tuan’s focus is on place and on space (1977). I’ve been incorporating Doreen Massey’s (2005) work in this field in considering my own practice for some time, but I’m new to Tuan. Their analysis is markedly different, though not, I believe, contradictory. Both are useful and valid perspectives from which to consider these elusive terms.

One key differences is, to my mind, that while Massey sees place-making as being a collective, social activity in which an individual involves themselves, for Tuan, place-making is a more individualistic, willed process of cognitive configuration in response to need and intention. For Massy, place acts upon us and we become entangled in it, our actions shaping the place not just for ourselves but for others; it is an interactive, social process. For Tuan, place is primarily constituted by the individual – the resident, the architect, artist, the scientist – through specific forms of gaze, enclosure and categorisation. Massey does acknowledge this as a part of place-making, but argues that it sets up conflict and a tendency towards enforcing stasis on place, as seen with conservationists, heritage organisations at one end of the scale and extreme nationalists at the other. Using this more individualistic model, Tuan is thus able to interrogate why place-making is a fundamental form of human conceptionalisation, arguing that doing so provides physical and emotional stability and calm, as well as a means of practical comparison between places. 

Space, on the other hand, is abstract, threatening, unformed, that to which we respond fearfully when we find ourselves lost; place, in essence, is tamed space. Space is movement; place is stasis. Massey, however, argues that the movement of space is unstoppable, and place is simply a combining and exclusion of different trajectories which constitute space. 

The timing of reading Tuan’s work is fortuitous, as I’m focussing on a more determinedly subjective response to the Pebblebed Heaths during this module, in preparation for exploring the subjective responses of others. Previously, I had let myself be open to and informed by the Heaths, when photographing, in social encounters, and through research. Now, however, I’m more interested in my own responses and, particularly, how I am constituting places and choosing places according to my own needs. I have mentioned previously my turn to the melancholy, but I believe the environments I seek out also provide psychological benefits; there is something reassuring in being enclosed by trees in some of the dense woodland, just as the emptiness of the plantations at the end of the day provides not just solitude but a privacy not possible on the heaths. I am aware of such places as being pre-made as such – enclosure banks, naming on maps, the prevalence of dens and trail adaptations – but I am also drawing on this material to constitute the place for myself, after my own fashion. 

What constitutes Uphams Plantation, for instance, as ‘place’ is quite different for me as for the mountain biker, the forester, the young family, the conservationist. Indeed, I’m increasingly finding myself subdividing the placeof the heaths in smaller and smaller places, with affect being the foundation of these. I suspect those groups previously mentioned will also be doing so, but for the mountain-biker, the trail is a place, for the conservationist, so is the Dartford Warbler habitat; Tilley and Cameron-Daum’s anthropological study of the heaths (2017) included map-making from different users, from model aircraft flyers to Marines, demonstrates the diversity of such placemaking, even amongst the same user groups.

As the heaths’ role in my personal life has been its support for my mental wellbeing – it was the place I knew I must visit first when recovering from nervous exhaustion – it makes sense that my own map, constituted by placemaking according to my own needs, should be the focus of a more subjective engagement with this considerable and varied tract of land. Conversely, it also helps account for the difficulty I have in capturing affect in areas to which I find it less easy to develop intimacy. 

Massey, D. 2005. For Space. London: SAGE Publications. 

Tilley, C., & Cameron-Daum, K. 2017. An Anthropology of Landscape. London: UCL Press. 

Tuan, Y. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

If my photography is a way of ‘thinking-through’ and expressing ideas about registered commons, and if I’m drawing on sensory research as a methodology to do so, then what is the theoretical basis for my evaluation? This is an ongoing question, one begun during my film Masters, when I drew heavily on environmental psychology. Sensory ethnography uses both film and photography as practice-based research, is deeply influenced by phenomenology, and takes as a central concern people’s relationships with space by making use of some key cultural geographers (Pink, 2015). I briefly engaged with this area of research in my Masters dissertation film, and am now deepening my knowledge of it, starting with the work of Doreen Massey, and will be continuing through the work of Tim Ingold and Yi Tu Fuan. Massey was herself involved in interdisciplinary work, including with filmmaker Patrick Keiller on his influential essay film, Robinson in Ruins (2010) which drew knowingly on the traditions of landscape painting and photography; this was one of the last projects she was involved with prior to her premature death. 

Massey defines space and place as distinct but indivisibly connected concepts (2006). Space, she sees as ‘the product of interrelations’, ‘the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist’ and ‘always under construction’; ‘relations’ here are ‘understood as embedded practices’. It is thus constantly unfolding, unpredictable and full of the unexpected. Her model is thus a fundamentally political one – describing ‘the realm of the configuration of potentially dissonant (or concordant) practices’. Massey also argues that time and space are only divisible in the abstract, that ‘time unfolds as change [and] space unfolds as interaction’, especially social interaction. 

Place, on the other hand, is where the trajectories and interrelations become ‘thrown together’, and equally where they fail to do so, held together by sets of ongoingly contested rules resulting from the ‘throwntogetherness’ of these trajectories and interrelations. Place is also constantly unfolding, hence it is both temporal and spatial, hence one cannot return to exactly the same place; attempts to enclose place in order to render it static is the basis for dangerous conservatism, but also poses difficult questions for heritage and conservation organisations. Doing so necessarily arrests many of the trajectories which constitute place. Rather, place is a negotiation between trajectories which are ‘sometimes ridden with antagonism’, and socially ‘places pose in particular form the question of our living together…the central question of the political’. Place formation can also require a more or less rigidly constructed ‘we’ or sets of ‘we’. 

So what does this have to do with common knowledge? First, it describes perfectly the two ways I approach my practice, as ways of engaging with the Pebblebed Heaths as space and as place. The Pebblebed Heaths first became known to me as places. They are held together by sets of rules which name them, are written into law, are written onto maps. Commons are a particular type of place and when I first visited in 2008, I mapped my understanding of those rules, many of them unexamined and cultural, onto my experience of being there. I have chosen commons because I believe there is much to be learned about such rules and their physical, psychological and phenomenological manifestations, especially the historic and unfolding politics and conflicts which shape them via different constructions of ‘we’. These rules and conflicts – signs of enclosure, and of controlled burning, for example – are the markers, if you like, which plot any walk I take through the commons. My examination of the heaths as places, then, is akin to working as a hunter, or a farmer, with distinctly formed intentions informed by my understandings of the commons as places. By hunting evidence, or nurturing its eventual appearance through farming, of the various conflicts and rules which construct the heaths as places, I am experiencing and representing them as a ‘throwntogetherness’ of trajectories. I am seeking out evidence. 

On the other hand, to experience anywhere solely as place is limiting, and to interrogate it critically one must also consider it as space, to tease apart the trajectories which form it. Doing this requires a loosening of intent, an openness to the happenstance and unexpected, as described by Massey, and this is precisely what most of my shoots are like: impulsive, aimless wanderings chasing after momentary fascinations and whims, and embodied experience which lets me be led by aesthetic and emotional response rather than hard-nosed wishes to represent as Rancière (2014) might put it (more of this in another post). This is when I am a gleaner, that is to say, most of the time. It is in doing so that I encounter the multiplicity of trajectories, including those excluded from the commons as closed ‘place’ – the fly-tippers, and the graffiti artists – as well as the non-human trajectories of ecological change – the ceaseless passage of water, the willows in bloom. Rather than seeking out evidence for the heaths as a place, and thus dealing with place in the abstract, I am becoming entangled in the heaths as space, and thus dealing with them in the particular, physical and as embodied experience. 

Both approaches complement one another; a quick email to the site manager about a freshly-gleaned trajectory lets me examine it in light of it being included or excluded from the heaths as rule-bound places. An intentional set of rules about, for example, military exclusion areas, gives me an emplaced starting point from which to begin exploring space. While the writing for this project deals more with the heaths as places, freighted as they are with facts, they are loosened by the absence of hard context in many of the images; using text more playfully and spatially is, perhaps, something to explore further at a later date. 

Deranty, J. 2014. Jacques Ranciere: Key Concepts. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Massey, D. 2006. For Space. London: Sage.

Pink, S. 2015. Doing Sensory Ethnography (second edition). London: Sage.