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.
untitled #4, 2005, Chrystel Lebas
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.
untitled #9, 2005, Chrystel Lebas
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.
untitled #1, 2003, Chrystel Lebas
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.
Harpford Common, 2020, Andy Thatcher
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.
Woodbury Common, 2020, Andy Thatcher
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.
Uphams Plantation, 2020, Andy Thatcher
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.
Uphams Plantation, 2020, Andy Thatcher
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.
Uphams Plantation, 2020, Andy Thatcher
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.
Uphams Plantation, 2020, Andy Thatcher
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.
Uphams Plantation, 2020, Andy Thatcher
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.
I’ve been a fan of Rebecca Solnit since reading Wanderlust (2014) a few years back and find her an uncompromising but compassionate and balanced voice on social media. It’s been great discovering that same voice applied to visual arts – the roots of her critical engagement – and photography; I’ve discussed elsewhere her excellent collaboration with Klett and Wolfe, Drowned River (2018). As Eve Said to the Serpent (2003) is a collection of essays and three have proven especially useful in developing – and challenging – my thinking.
At its core, Elements of a New Landscape is a critique of Plato’s cave which proposes alternatives. This foundational metaphor has never sat right with me, and Solnit problematises it as a highly gendered metaphor: a move from womblike irrationalism, upward to male empiricism and separation from the earth. She argues that much recent landscape art, and landscape photography, reverses this movement, and that a return into the cave is turning back from toxic progress, demonstrated in the mounting ecological crisis. It is also an unsentimental return to connecting with the earth, a restatement of unavoidable human entanglement with natural systems – and thus also the damage meted out on them. This entanglement rejects abstraction, favouring a subjective, sensory, tangible collaboration with landscape and a close observation from within. With specific reference to photography, Solnit notes its historic emphasis on the frame’s caesura and demonstrates how through installation work and self-insertion, the viewer can become involved while keeping intact photography’s evidentiary force which, she argues, plays a crucial role in reporting on the crisis. While I’ve long viewed my practice as an embodied entanglement inside landscape, and while I’m increasingly adopting a more subjective stance in my practice, it remains conventional. I’m not – yet- ready to make the leap to self-insertion, or installation, but will let those ideas float at the back of my mind.
Unsettling the West: Contemporary Landscape Photography challenges an inherent binary in more conventional work, which distinguishes between landscape and social documentary photography, forcing a choice between aesthetics and tradition on the one hand, and political awareness and commentary on the other. Solnit does not see this is a recent turn, referring to Frank and Eggleston as documentarians of landscape, but is nevertheless one which has becoming more prominent. Speaking of Klett’s work, she points to his accommodation of both majestic “wilderness” and man’s banal but savage impact on it, without recourse to simplistic “elegies for a raped landscape” (94). This clean break between ‘virgin’ and ‘raped’ landscapes is one she returns to, arguing that the foundational work of Ansel Adams on the one hand, which deliberately strips Yosemite of human traces, is one side of the same coin as the New Topgraphic photographers’ trash-filled prairies in which human activity is dominant. This certainly resonates with my own work, as I never wish to settle on either the pristine or the ruined, but somehow incorporate both; certainly, to address conservation and the human enjoyment of non-urban areas is to weigh up precisely this.
Scapeland is an essay written to accompany Misrach’s Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach (1996), which I will explore in some depth at a later date. She develops the themes of Unsettling The West with specific reference to the work of Misrach, arguing that in landscapes such as the desert is to be found precisely the complex, violently confrontation landscape that eludes the pastoral or sublime modes. Solnit specifically evaluates the role of beauty in these images, attacking a leftist rejection of beauty as unequal and elitist, no less than a right-wing belief in it as wholesome, conservative. She argues that beauty can be and is found everywhere, citing Constable’s belief that nothing is truly ugly, and that beauty is profoundly complex, suggesting fragility, transience, as well as seduction and violence. The desert, she points out, is the ideal landscape for exploring such contradictions. I am similarly troubled by but unwilling to reject, ideas of beauty, especially where beauty might permit a decontextualisation – and thus depoliticisation – of landscape. The commons are not so violent as the desert, and yet with their military traces and the evidence of often brutal landscape management, such as soil scrapes, to portray the experience of them in pastoral terms is to turn them into something they are not; finding the beautiful in a soil scrape is, however, something I have yet to achieve, though not through lack of trying. I look for an uneasy tension between beauty and political complexity in much of my work. Solnit illustrates here how it might be done by a master of his art.
Klett, M., Solnit, R., & Wolfe, B. (2018). Drowned River: the death and rebirth of Glen Canyon on the Colorado. Santa Fe: Radius Books.
Misrach, R. (1996). Crimes and Splendors: the desert cantos of Richard Misrach. Boston: Bullfinch Press.
Solnit, R. (2003). As Eve Said to the Serpent: on landscape, gender, and art. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press.
Solnit, R. (2014). Wanderlust: a history of walking. London: Granta.
Melancholy is a neglected, maligned and misunderstood word. There’s something distinctly archaic about it, with a whiff of Byronic Romantic excess. It’s also collapsed with milder forms of depression and thus suffers the cultural fear of contagion which still, alas, accompanies conceptions of mental illness and fragility. It is, to some extent, both of these things, but is also much more than that. Melancholy is an innately pleasurable form of sadness – think of Allegri’s Miserere, Love’s Forever Changes, the paintings of Edward Hopper, the haiku of Shiki. It is a productive, not an overwhelming sadness, for in melancholy one can contemplate and begin to resolve difficult feelings, such as grief, loss, despair, loneliness, or simply the ultimate transience of that which is good. In a contemporary culture slavishly obsessed with happiness, whatever that might mean, the Melancholy is both devalued and conversely, given the rising rates of depression and anxiety, more necessary than ever.
Jacky Bowring’s Melancholy in the Landscape (2017) examines the different forms though which melancholy is expressed in landscape from the urban to the wilderness. While concentrating on landscape architecture, Bowring also addresses the visual arts, including photography. Her central argument is that melancholy needs to be considered alongside and interdependent with the Picturesque, the Beautiful and the Sublime as drawing on the same cultural and historic wellspring; in essence, she argues, we need to speak in terms of the Melancholy. It is crucial in parsing these terms to consider their affective differences, for while the Beautiful leans towards the joyful and transcendent, the Picturesque to a pleasing sense of worldly order, the Sublime to awe and terror, the Melancholy, according to Edmund Burke, in music emphasises ‘that melting, that sinking, that languor’. (28) The Melancholy thus, according to Karen Till (39) speaking of Holocaust memorials, carefully opens up a ‘wound’ to permit difficult emotions to emerge in a safe space; to this extent, it could therefore be said the Melancholy provides a valuable therapeutic function without proposing a cure. Speaking of Sontag’s discussion of the anaesthetising effects of overexposure to human suffering, Bowring also argues that the Melancholy, through its subtlety, engages and makes possible an empathetic engagement with the suffering of others (43).
Bowring sets out this argument eloquently and persuasively in Part 1; in Part 2, she sets out a taxonomy of expressions of the Melancholy. Bowring’s taxonomy overlaps to no small extent with Mark Fisher’s (2016) parsing of the Weird and the Eerie from the Uncanny (see earlier post on this). Certainly, all three make possible the Melancholy, and indeed the Uncanny is included here specifically. I have found Bowring’s taxonomy extraordinary with regards to my own practice, as here is set out the overwhelming majority of my stylistic, affective, and contextual drive as a photographer. This is to some extent unsurprising, as I have struggled with varying forms of anxiety and depression throughout my life since my mid-teens. I have sought out music, art, films, literature – and photography – which neither makes me confront the terrors of these emotions, nor escape them, but to permit me to dwell in them and thus find consolation and, to some extent, a resolution. It thus makes sense to address how I see this taxonomy reflected in my work, and to demonstrate this, I will make use of a single photo shoot, at East Budleigh Common, in the evening of June 14th of this year.
East Budleigh Common, 2020, Andy Thatcher.
The Void implies an absence due to abandonment, and thus loss, and Bowring evaluates commemorative memorials which make use of empty chairs including scenic benches and an installation dedicated to the victims of the Christchurch earthquake of 2011. I have become fascinated with the many den structures found across the Pebblebed Heaths and photographed them often, though have largely been dissatisfied with the results. My interest is in part their interesting geometries, the angles and triangular shapes a deep contrast with the woodland around them, but it is also that they imply the hands which built them and the bodies which inhabited them. This is made all the more poignant for the dens’ connection with childhood and parenthood, a period of life itself characterised by transience and eventual loss.
East Budleigh Common, 2020, Andy Thatcher.
Bowring simplifies The Uncanny as making the familiar strange, with or without doubling, and this is something that informs much of my work. I have become a little obsessed with the strange, tentacular structures which parasitic vines leave on trees, and which remind me of horror writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and Spielberg’s derided but rather wonderful War of the Worlds. Woodland is, culturally and affectively, often a weird place, and this is part of its appeal. My recurrent shots of these vines reflect this; that woodlands, often considered life-giving and even therapeutic in the case of shinrin-yoku, might also be sinister, even hostile.
East Budleigh Common, 2020, Andy Thatcher.
Shadows and darkness can be horrific in the sense of the Sublime, but they can also be merely threatening, or simply unsettling. They imply absence, defamiliarisation and the loss of certainty, of sensory competency, and of the things one holds dear. Metaphorically, they already signify melancholy and sadness – the darkening of mood, the dark pit of despair. In this shot of a beech tree, the tree is almost a silhouette, the absent lush, vibrant green of the leaves and moss almost teasingly suggested by the ferns behind, the darkened crevices of the trunk seemingly reptilian.
East Budleigh Common, 2020, Andy Thatcher.
Liminality can be expressed in a variety of ways and liminal spaces have been the subject of previous work of mine. I’m interested in entranceways, meeting points, passages, and ‘edgeland’ areas, and gates and border areas continue to feature in my work on the commons. The passage from one state to another suggests transience and the anxiety of indeterminacy. In the case of twilight, this also suggests death and like darkness and shadows, this draws on deeply-ingrained cultural and mythological iterations. I’ve long been drawn to photograph over the long summer evenings, once the golden light reddens and especially in the otherworldly turquoises and purples following sunset. This image is itself a liminal space, a triangular road junction of unused land, at a liminal moment. The empty roads further accentuate the melancholy mood here.
East Budleigh Common, 2020, Andy Thatcher.
Fragments in the form of ruins are one of the most familiar features of Picturesque landscape paintings and are associated with Sublime forms such as the Gothic. They are themselves liminal, poised between a complete structure and their inevitable, eventual complete destruction, and this infers transience and loss. Cognitively, their incompletion prompts their imaginative reconstruction, and doing so suggests the limits of knowledge just as it does, by comparison, the sadness of their degraded state. All lives have their ruins – ruined marriages, ruined childhoods, ruined Christmases, ruined opportunities – and contemplating ruins outside of the Picturesque and the Sublime makes possible an empathic self-evaluation. This gate indicates a ruined intention, a failure to assert power.
East Budleigh Common, 2020, Andy Thatcher.
Leavings, what become for the artist ‘found objects’, are another favourite theme of my work, and indeed are things I have collected over the years. Unlike the dens, a ‘leaving’ suggests a need for its return to its owner as if it were a ‘phantom limb’. Leavings have not been abandoned but lost, forgotten and mislaid. They imply narratives and the people who left them there. Such things are, according to Margaret Gibson, ‘stranded objects’ (119) and according to Bowring ‘outside time and space’ which ‘prevent closure’. This image is the only one taken prior to the shoot, although only by a few days. It is a primary school leaver’s shirt, itself a poignant, melancholic object, communicating loss, transience and the uncertainty of the unknown. The sadness I felt in encountering it was tangibly real, and I hoped whoever had left it there did not miss it so very terribly. I felt a powerful yearning, itself a melancholy mood, to return it.
East Budleigh Common, 2020, Andy Thatcher.
Submersion, whether by water, sand, plants or otherwise, is a liminal state of a particular order. It ‘confounds boundaries’ (137) and suggests the unstoppable forces which lead towards the extinction of all. This being so, submersion resonates with apocalyptic tropes. There’s an ambiguity to the World War II ruins at East Budleigh Common for, on the one hand they are a reminder of conflicts past, but on the other, are evidence of the transience of the man-made, and in particular of the masculine of which the military is emblamatic.
East Budleigh Common, 2020, Andy Thatcher.
Weathering and patina are similar to, but quite different to fragmentation and submersion, for they retain intact the traces of what they once were and are in the process of erasure and becoming other; like memories, they are fading. Faded artwork lacks the Gothic overtones of the ruin, the apocalyptic of submersion, but rather theirs is the sadness of neglect, heavy with regret. I’ve been particularly drawn to the faded graffiti on the old bunkers, more so than the fresh, vibrant recent work. This artwork is not created to last, and indeed is often painted on top of other artwork, but nevertheless the lack of vitality suggests the decrepitude of old age rather than the death of submersion or ruin. Weathering reveals not a change of state but the object itself in the process of disintegration.
I am deepening an awareness of my subjective response to the Pebblebed Heaths in preparation for better learning about the subjective experiences of others. This process has been both surprising and productive, for it has connected this landscape to my sense of self and personal history in a profound way.
Bowring, J. 2017. Melancholy and the Landscape: Locating Sadness, Memory and Reflection in the Landscape. London: Routledge.
Fisher, M. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater.
I’ve a lifelong love of horror, ghost stories, sci-fi and fantasy, and though I’ve long been familiar with Freud’s notion of the unheimlich – weakly translated into English as the Uncanny – it’s never sat well with the work I prefer or the moods I sometimes seek out when photographing the landscape. Mark Fisher (2016) has done an excellent job of teasing apart three interrelated but distinct concepts – the uncanny, the weird, and the eerie – and this has helped provide a focus for my work over the past weeks as I’ve roamed in the weird and eerie moods and sensory encounters made possible by the long dusks as we approach the summer solstice.
Fisher argues that while all three are similar in their affect and in their defamiliarising effects, the uncanny is quite different to the other two, pointing to Freud’s original word, the unheimlich, as rooted in the domestic as the literal translation – the unhomely – suggests. The unheimlich, he argues, starts with the familiar and makes it strange from within whereas the weird and the eerie impose strangeness from the outside. Hence, for example, the automaton of Hoffman’s The Sandman, mentioned by Freud, is created out of ideas of the family. The unheimlich therefore requires a degree of retention of the homely to exert its unhomely effect.
Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, on the other hand, might similarly seem to be a tale of parenting turned monstrous, but there is nothing homely about its golden-eyed children from the outset; they are imposed from the outside. This is a good example of what Fisher describes as the weird as bringing ‘to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it and which cannot be reconciled with the ‘homely” (10), particularly when two things are brought together that should not logically be, in this case a hyper-intelligent hive mind and biologically human children.
Of course it could be argued that, in the case of The Sandman, the wild science which makes possible the automaton is ‘beyond’ the homely, but I would counter this is only in a very limited way: it is the father’s job, keeping him within the orthodoxies of family structure, and it is also within the orthodoxies of contemporary culture through science, though only just. There is, to the weird, a contingent unknowability, and I might draw the distinction between two canonical doubles, the double often considered as de facto uncanny. The Mr. Hyde of The Strange case of Dr. Jekyl & Mr. Hyde is, like the automaton, a creation of the laboratory. He is monstrous, the science is extreme, but Mr. Hyde retains some of the familiar behaviours and traits of a gentleman; it is this latter that especially provides its deeply unsettling uncanny effects. There is nothing unknowable about Mr. Hyde’s existence – Stevenson saves his explorations of that for his psychological insights. The Portrait of Dorian Gray, on the other hand, is the result of a form of curse which (at least in the book) is never adequately explained. There is a clear intervention of something unknowable from the outside: how has this happened – and why? We are not told. The monstrous double in the painting is thus not homely at all and so cannot be considered unhomely: it is, rather, weird.
Fisher’s idea of the eerie is related but quite distinct: whereas with the weird, something exists where there should be nothing, or where nothing exists where there should be something. Hence, despite its iconic familiarity, the Tardis always retains a sense of the eerie wherever it crops up and hence the empty motorways at the height of lockdown were frequently referred to as eerie. In both cases, as with the weird, unknowability plays its part, though quite differently. The unknowability of the Tardis is the logic-defying otherness of time travel and its Doctor; this unknowability allows the Tardis to occupy tellingly liminal spaces in each storyline, spaces where there should typically be nothing. The empty motorways of March and April 2020, however, did have a logical, knowable cause – the application of government restrictions in response to a global pandemic. All the same, empty motorways are not a unique phenomenon and can be caused by serious accidents, road works, demonstrations, and do not then appear eerie. I would argue that a failure to fully accept, grasp and adapt to a reality that was continually shifting and unpredictable was behind this feeling of eerie more than any connection with apocalyptic cinema. One simply did not know when, if ever, the motorways would run again, and this demonstrates how an unknowable outside acts on the familiar to render it eerie.
So what has all this to do with my practice? First, one has to acknowledge the utter subjectivity to applying these modes. One has to experience a familiarity in something to experience the uncanny; one has to experience a lack of knowledge of what should or should not be to experience the weird and the eerie. The failing light of dusk helps to weaken certainty just as the purple hues accentuate strangeness. In such a state of mild reverie, it becomes easier to suspend what might otherwise be knowable and suggest less literal readings of the landscape.
East Budleigh Common, 2020, Andy Thatcher.
Hence, the fallen and felled trees entangling roots and pebbles seem to become a single, Lovecraftian organic entity; what has caused this fusion of vegetal and mineral is unknowable; it becomes weird.
East Budleigh Common, 2020, Andy Thatcher.
Hence the child’s drawing which does not belong in the brambles of East Budleigh common sheds daylight’s familiar explanation of a family picnic and infers a family snatched by fanged monsters.
Woodbury Common, 2020, Andy Thatcher.
A chunk of the Rock of Gibraltar sits on a rise on Woodbury Common, a commemorative gift for the Royal Marines who first cut their teeth there. The rock is a pale blue and always looks out of place, but the dusk makes it shine purple against the dark heathland vegetation and its shape becomes a ghostly abstract. In the midst of this darkening landscape where there should be nothing, there is a palpable eerie something; perhaps the rock fulfils a darker purpose, perhaps some obscene evil lurks beneath it.
Colaton Raleigh Common, 2020, Andy Thatcher.
In the daytime, these army tracks lead to one of the flagpoles used to warn the public of the firing of live ammunition, but after sundown, the tracks and empty flagpole imply the absence of human activity, indeed the empty expansiveness of the heaths. Where has everyone gone? Will they ever return? It is easy to fall into such reveries without altering or fictionalising anything in front of the camera.
Commons are complex places, full of lost histories, silent wars of attrition and endless idiosyncrasies. Beyond being a place for picnics, dog-walking, den-building and mountain-biking, they are places of conflict and violent change, both political and environmental. The pebbles themselves are evidence of millions of years of violent climate change during the Triassic age, a long way from the comfortable beach pebbles one puts in one’s pocket. I have been searching for a way to incorporate this with the familiar and comforting way the heaths occur to most people. It may be that through deploying the weird and the eerie, sparingly perhaps, I might be able to achieve this reconciliation.
Fisher, M. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books.
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’.
Ordnance Survey, 2015.
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.
Andy Thatcher, East Budleigh Common, 2020.
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.
Andy Thatcher, East Budleigh Common, 2020.
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.
Andy Thatcher, Woodbury Common, 2020.
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.
I love it when I come across a photographer who feels like a fellow traveller. Shore. Godwin. Gossage. And now Billingham to add to the list. Why? Billingham, like me, has a fascination with bold lines and bands of texture and colour. Like me, people are within the landscape, if they’re there at all. He also has an eye for extremes – acute angles, brutally partitioned flat horizons. What is especially interesting is that his images largely place natural lines either horizontally (horizons, water) or vertically (trees, cliffs). It’s the manmade lines that are typically diagonal – tracks, wires, fences.
Pond, 2002.Tree Boles. 2002.
What really impresses me, aside from the immersive sequencing of this collection, is how his eye and style applies itself to such a variety of landscapes in such a way that they’re rendered both uniform and distinctive, as with the two pictures below.
South Downs. 2003. Ethiopian Landscape. 2002.
The collection demonstrates a sameness to landscapes which allows the viewer to consider their distinctiveness by, effectively, placing them side by side. Here, both compositions are similar. But the colours, the sky, the cattle, dust – and lack of it, metalled surface – and lack of it – sharply delineate the economic power which makes a leisure trip to the South Downs, from the lack of it which is evidenced by the subsistence farming of Ethiopia.
I’m still determining my style, as I don’t want to limit the communicative aspect of my practice by narrowing too much. Billingham’s work demonstrates that style and message can form a coherent whole.
Grass Verge, 2001.
Billingham, R. 2008. Landscapes 2001-2003. Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing.
This book is a masterpiece of mood and narrative. Chris Killip is new to me, however celebrated he might be within the world of photography. This selection of photos were taken over a ten year period across Ireland. A third are in black and white, Killip’s style dips into documentary shots of events such as pilgrimage and sea bathing, abstracts, landscapes, domestic details, some are shot from car windows. And yet, and without any accompanying text, they form an emotional and narrative unity. There is much, much for me to learn here, about suggestion, narrative, mood, continuity and discontinuity. One format is continually adhered to: the left hand page is always a single black and white shot of a pilgrimage into the mountains, with the pilgrims almost uniformly dominating the frame, which the right hand page is aways colour, though between one and four images. The effect is of following a single pilgrimage – without accompanying detail, it might just as well be a single pilgrimage though it is in fact two – up and down the mountain. This provides a narrative arc, perhaps the most primordial of all narrative arcs.
The colour shots are brought into dialogue with each shot – sometimes through explicit visual referencing such as a winding road, or thematic, such as a particularly arduous moment of the pilgrimage with a stone hand-constructed cross, suggesting penitence. Sometimes both sides show pilgrimage, providing a paradoxical sense of changing times and continuity.
At other times, the connection isn’t explicit, but so carefully sequenced around other images that one feels as if it must be connected and so forges the connection oneself – an old man paired with a thatched roof decaying implies the inevitability of time passing and thus death, linking the teenagers in black and white and as misbehaving sea-bathers suggests a universality of experience that embraces contradiction and subversion.
Particularly important for me is that, when Killip pairs with semi-abstracts with a botanical or geographical subject, a powerful sensory impression is delivered: the textures of scree suggest the sound and difficulty of walking over it illustrated in black and white, a young adult in prayer paired with a colourful, sunlit tree suggests peacefulnes, pilgrims on steep inclines paired on two double spreads with blocked field entrances suggests difficulty and determination. What I can begin to learn from here – and what I can now begin to transfer as knowledge from editing film – is how photographs can together create meanings that individually they cannot. I am accustomed to thinking of photographs as singular worlds. Killip has shown me that fresh and powerful meanings are possible when thinking of them in combination.
Killip, C. 2009. Here Comes Everybody: Chris Killip’s Irish Photographs. London: Thames & Hudson.
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