Been catching up on Joe Moran’s blog, reading some of his old posts and like this; “Photography has a potentially closer relationship to the everyday than other visual forms because of what Walter Benjamin calls its ‘unconscious optics,’ its ability ‘to capture fleeting and secret moments whose images paralyse the associative mechanisms in the beholder’. [...]
I worked with 30 children from South Dartmoor Community College; together we collaborated on creating on mapping their emotional landscape. Seven maps were created in all and were the product of a course – Emotion Mapping – I helped devise in consultation with the art and media depart at the school.
When the motorways arrived, many thought, wrongly, that there verges were common land and since they were only enclosed by waist-high post and rail fences, pedestrians could easily use them for hitchhiking, traffic gazing and flower picking. Gradually, though, the verges become an impenetrable no-mans land and motorways turned into barriers in the landscape as impassable as railway lines.
I have been researching the second stage of the School Looks Around project. This time we will focus on geography and art. For this I have been re-visiting the work of Ursula Biemann, an artists whose work much impressed me when I saw the John Hansard Gallery exhibition, Port City: On Mobility and Exchange. I [...]
