Having just completed exercise 2.4 I am now prompted to set out some thoughts on Assignment 2. In fact I have been thinking about it, and indeed working on it, for a few weeks now.
The first task has been to identify a journey that I can document. This has more than anything come down to a simple matter of practicalities. I do not make many journeys these days, and even fewer at this time of the year (today is Christmas Eve) and most of them are fairly short car journeys. See evidently it is difficult to photograph and drive at the same time and I do not particularly want to have to keep stopping to get out to take pictures. I do of course make lots of “journeys” on foot while walking my dog but I know from experience it ids difficult to handle a camera at the same time. I have also already explored such an approach back in EYV when doing the Square Mile project.
The journey that presents itself as the more practical is my monthly train ride into Newcastle so by default, if nothing else, this is going to be my subject.
Exercise 2.4 suggests making some maps using Google Maps or some other system. I do not though feel this is particularly useful for what I want to do. I am not concerned to identify and photograph particular places along the route, which in any event I already know pretty well have done this trip, I calculate, more than 4,500 times over the last fourteen years. Rather I am more interested in the process of the journey and how I relate to it, how I experience it.
Prompted by the Wang Fuchun exhibition that I wrote about recently (https://markrobinsonocalandscape.photo.blog/2019/12/04/one-billion-journeys-exhibition/), particularly the almost exclusively inward looking focus of the train passengers, I realised that for many of those journeys the landscape outside through which the train passes, along the Tyne valley, right next to the river itself for much of the route, has passed as little more than a blur. Most of those journeys have focused on something else, within the train: reading my paper, doing some work, occasionally falling asleep (it is a wonder that only twice in all those years did I miss my stop on the way home because I nodded off), or simply because it was dark outside (during the winter both in the morning and the evening). What I am interested in is therefore a sense of movement, of being in motion, and little more than snatched glimpses of things, places, people, fleetingly visible through the window.
I have been consciously influenced in this regard by the work of Kazuma Obara that I have mentioned before (2018) where he has pictured the passing landscape from within the Slavutych/Chernobyl train. Unlike the rest of his work in that project my intention is not to photograph the interior of the train or its passengers, given that the sense of the physical movement of the journey is what interests me more. That said, I might well try some interior shots on my next trip just to see what they achieve and how they might fit with the exterior shots.
With that scheme in mind I have already done some test shots, using my last trip into town. To achieve what I want I realised early on in the planning that I did not want to try to pick subjects and targets as the train moves along. I know from experience in any event that this can be quite difficult to pull off. Instead what I wanted was a sense of randomness. I therefore set up the camera facing straight out of the window on a block of foam (to dampen some of the vibrations) perched on top of my camera bag. I then set a remote interval timer so that the camera would take a picture automatically every ten seconds of whatever happened to be visible. The camera itself was therefore recording whatever passed in front of it without me having to make any active choices about what to photograph, and what not. Because the train was moving the autofocus occasionally could not find a target so a number of possible shots were not taken, adding an extra element of randomness.
I still have to sort out some contact sheets from this first foray (there are something like 160 shots that need to be organised) but I can already see that some interesting pictures have emerged.
Obara, K, (2018). Exposure / Everlasting. Cordoba: Editorial RM / RM Verlag
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 