Photography & Psychogeography as a Form of Inner Mapping
This was where it all began, what I clung to as I found out we were developing a body of work which demonstrates a personal exploration of contemporary arts practice. We were prompted to think about our existing practice (did I even have one? It didn’t feel like I did!) and to either take risks or develop an emerging practice into something meaningful.
Immediately, I thought of my garden (landscape/place) and the design element of that and, naturally, photography. I have an A Level in photography, albeit from quite some time ago. There is also a natural history in my family, my dad and paternal great grandmother both keen photographers. I generally used my iPhone to take photos, which I shared on Instagram, although my husband had bought me a DSLR and polaroid camera to encourage me to reignite the hobby.
I have always been interested in psychogeography and so photography re-entered my practice as a means of mapping my emotional and physical responses to the landscape and my journey. The derive, the drifting through the landscape without a fixed purpose (whilst I was still trying to work out what my purpose was), became an act of mapping both inner and outer exploration. My camera became the tool to capture this. Walking became not just about the act of walking, but about an artistic process. Taking photos became a means of capturing, where the photograph became the residue of what I was feeling and experiencing at that time and in that place.
I suppose, because photography came most naturally to me and felt the least risky, I gave my photos less value than some of the other experimental materials and processes. Thinking about what the photos mean to me has made me realise how significant they are; how they are such a crucial thread through the assemblage of ideas.
I was inspired by the work of, among others, Fay Godwin and Richard Long. Like Godwin, my photographs are often stark and capture the encounter between self and space. Like Long, the photographs show that the process is as important as the product. Walking itself was part of the artwork. My photographs of a track through long grass or a shadow cast by sacred trees, are not just records of that moment but they are liminal objects. These photographs, yes capture the outer landscape, but they also capture my inner landscape. They are thresholds. They are evidence of when my internal landscape was altered by what I was experiencing in the outer landscape. They catch the moment between. Turner explains that liminality is a space where things are suspended (Turner, 1996) and Deleuze and Guattari explain that in the ‘intermezzo’, is ‘where things pick up speed’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013, p. 27) and transformation is possible. It is incredible that a photograph can hold that in between place.
I dabbled, as a result of a lot of this thinking about liminal places and risk taking, in exploring Fluxus and automatism. I experimented with extending my photographic boundaries to include video and sound recording. I am pleased with the results and would definitely like to explore this further in the future. Whilst these sit happily on my Instagram and here, they don’t feel right in the body of work.
Through my lens, the landscape became a palimpsest of place, time, memory, emotion, discovery. It has allowed me to dissolve the boundary between my art, myself and my life. The act of walking, taking photos, observing, gathering and making have become interwoven. Each inform the other and the process of art making, through photography, has become self-making.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2013) A Thousand Plateaus. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Turner, V. (1996) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Routledge.
