What I Learn By Walking...With a Camera.

TO walk is to travel and in the most to travel is to get from point A to point B. Normally we take steps to move to where we need to be. We cover a distance habitually within a certain amount of time, simply because it is where we're supposed to be. We walk to work to be there on time and we understand this walk.... we know how long it will take and where it will lead us; to work, to being on time. We do this because we need to, to be late is to suffer repercussions and this makes the act of walking detached to its basic parameter of movement through NEW space. In a way when we walk like this we choose to 'walk the line'  by knowing where we're going, by pre-supposing the space we are travelling through and ultimately by letting this affect the way we see the walk and experience it.  All of these experiences add up to a condensing of space it becomes smaller as we do not consider the 'inbetween'  just the leaving of point A and the arrival at point B.

When I spoke about the parameters of movement being about exploring NEW space this does not necessarily entail walking a new route, Heraclitus famously wrote "You could not step twice into the same river" (1) .This is true when you walk the same path, it is in essence never the same path, things change both externally with the passing of the seasons, light, smells and sounds, as well as internally within yourself through emotions and thoughts. There is always NEW space however it is through a repetition of walking the same path to get from A to B that this space becomes not only condensed but almost irrelevant.

This can all change with the introduction of a camera. The camera collects light, time and space and therefore alters our relationship to these three elements. When taking images there is nothing you can pass by as the 'inbetween'  no space appears irrelevant "The mind see's and continues to see objects, while the spirit finds the nest of immensity in an object" (2) the camera begins to strip away the minds-eye from the reality of space and grants me the opportunity to see within it an immensity. By stopping to photograph something I stop, pause, breathe and negotiate the space that is in front of me. I immediately become more aware of its physicality, its abstractions and if I look hard enough its spirit.

So to walk with a camera is to open our doors of perception and allow the underlying current of the spirit of space to enter. This space exists not only in passing, with the photograph it is both embalmed in time and also becomes a new way of experiencing time and space when the photograph is taken.

Space outside ourselves, invades and ravishes things
If you want to achieve the existence of a tree,
Invest it with inner space, this space 
That has its being in you. Surround it with compulsions
It knows no bounds, and only really becomes a tree,
If it takes its place in the heart of your renunciation. 

Rilke, Poem dated June 1924. (3)


1, http://thinkexist.com/quotation/you_can_never_step_into_the_same_river-for_new/13660.html

2. Poetics of Space , PG. 190

3. http://borascogitations.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/inner-space-like-tree.html