sense of place

as a super-amateur photographer and an admittedly un-academic person, one of the more natural instincts i have is to capture “sense of place” when i’m shooting a photo. but of course, this isn’t always successful when i try. among friends i’m known to always have my camera out, holding at waist height, and shoot photos of random people on the street — the perpetual tourist. sometimes this works, but usually i just get too-blurry images of people’s feet (or the sky) that get deleted and forgotten immediately. a few samples, below.

hong kong market, jan. 2008

north 7th street, brooklyn, ny, aug. 2008

shenzhen, china, jan. 2008

creating a sense of place in photos requires assembling building blocks of significant details which capture the feeling of how the place felt at the time the photo was taken. each detail has to add something to the feeling – or be cut out. until recently, i had the hardest time cropping any details out of my photos because i tend to default to the idea that photos are a source for information — and the more information, the better. but i’ve been trying to train myself to crop with discipline.

this photo, for example, for my Significant Detail assignment, was actually a heavily-cropped version of what i originally captured:

detail, Boston Seaport, oct. 08

but clearly there’s a slightly closer crop that can be achieved:

detail, Boston Seaport, oct. 08

Joel Meyerowitz, in his book Creating a Sense of Place:

These pictures are signs that you came to consciousness for a brief second in the flow of your life, which is so overloaded with stimuli that it can drive you away from concentration. And if you can be focused again and again, you’ll be able to look down the line of your pictures, and see your particular focus, your sign, and know that you are the signifier. (Meyerowitz, Creating a Sense of Place, 12)

this is evoked in his 1988 image of Atlanta, depicting One Atlantic Center in the background:

i connected with this image in Meyerowitz’s book because he draws the eye not only to the forces of nature and decay on the lot in which he’s standing, but also the gold-tipped building in the distance. a little internet research told me that One Atlantic Center is not just a huge office building there, but its pencil-shaped gold hat recalls similar post-modern towers such as Tech Tower, which make reference, somewhat, to the original 1930 City Hall tower in Atlanta. this image therefore evokes Atlanta from the point of view of the suburbs, reaching always toward the center.

i’ve been very much enjoying the Meyerowitz reading/looking…and one day when i’m rich i hope to own one of his books so that i can look at them more often than my two hours in Rotch!

environmental autobiography

in class recently, we conducted an exercise based on Clare Cooper Marcus’s environmental autobiography and my ‘childhood self’ took me back to my favorite spot from ages 8-13: the rock at the top of the mountain near my childhood home.

this is what i drew.

i used to hike up the mountain, often a solitary adventure, to climb this rock and check out the view from the top.

not the exact spot, but closeby.

i loved climbing things, and i loved the freedom of escape from home and the indoors. at home, rules were endless, and vistas limited (and static). there was no adventure in the home-zone. and in retrospect, i can imagine my thirteen-year-old self feeling suffocated in my cul-de-sac home in the subdivided neighborhood where i grew up.

i can recognize that thirteen-year-old in myself today. a lover of the big city and the action that makes it hum, i’m an independent, curious and stubborn observer of my environment. i rarely stop to ask for an explanation but rather hope to discover clues about what i see (and am similarly reluctant to ask for directions, in the hopes that the layout of things will clue me in to path i should take).

these characteristics have both helped and hindered my visits to the Boston Seaport, the site i’ve chosen for my photography project. i was drawn to the site by the clues that indicate commerce and trade – particularly at Fish Pier, where commercial activity collides with another fascination of mine – fish markets.  though not a shy person, i have struggled to be more than an independent observer of the landscape, and my goal for the semester is to engage the actors in the landscape more. i am particularly inspired by the technique  Dorothea Lange used to capture the stories behind her portraits and landscapes – by holding casual conversation with the characters in each story.

in the Seaport, i am also drawn to explore the edge between the exciting and the mundane. to me, the dynamism of ship activity is thrilling – but the convention center is (horribly) statically not so. what links the two and how can some of the excitement (danger, even) of the waterfront percolate throughout the rest of the district?

is this thing on?

twenty-first century here i come. i started this blog for a class i am taking this semester.