It’s taken months, but I’ve just finished the first photography course I ever enrolled in.
FWIW, here is my final submission. It is called “Paths and Places”, to travel along lanes
and meet life in rural Australia. My approach is to create a series of six doublets that link a lane or path to an expression of life in place. The genre is wildlife and nature, and I am largely
holding to a documentary style that encourages the view to be present within and before the subject.
My intention is that the doublets are steppingstones for the viewer along an outer journey from urban fringe to the spiritual centre of Australia. This is a mimesis of an inner spiritual journey of movement and encounter.
A path is its own place of encounter, more than a means to a place. The images of path also lead to the life found in place. Paths may be roads, tracks, or streams.
Technically, Pathway images have a deeper depth of focus and are cropped to a vertical format to emphasis linear progress. Place images are all cropped to landscape format to give wider scope for the location and the subjects held there. The four-thirds format is retained to imply an essential unity born of being present within these moments.
Path and place are both integral elements of a journey.
Linking path and places in this set invites the viewer to respect each phase of the j ourney. Photographer Simon Norfolk draws us deeper into a sense of place. For Norfolk place and time are intimately linked; “‘chronotope’: a place that allows movement through space and time simultaneously, a place that displays the ‘layeredness’ of time”. [1] This shows through in his Chronotopia series from Afghanistan, and his recent series of London during the pandemic.
Architect Thomas Barrie reminds us that ‘a path is characterised as a linear progression but is also experienced as having a character of its own… Paths represent a basic property of human existence… While human concepts of place are related to ancient beliefs that certain places demarcate a sacred centre’. [2]
Together this collection invites fresh awareness of wonder in the place we already live, engagement with our capacity for journey along pathways, appreciation for the places our journeys take us towards, and our capacity to choose both the paths and places we may encounter.
The images are autoplaying below, or click the arrows to navigate in your own time. I hope you enjoy them.
[1] https://www.simonnorfolk.com/afghanistan-chronotopia Accessed January 6, 2021.
[2] Thomas Barrie, “Spiritual Path, Sacred Place: Myth, Ritual, and Meaning in
Architecture” Shambhala, 1996, p. 39
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