“What a long strange trip it’s been”, as the Grateful Dead sang on “Trucking” on their “American Beauty” album. (No, I am not a Deadhead and this is the only one of their albums that I have in my collection. It just struck me as apt for present purposes.) To within just a couple of days I have been shooting this assignment for a full year so I think it is now time to stop. The next step is to finalise the slideshows, which are already largely ready, but for now I have some initial observations on the whole process.
First, here are some of the pictures that I took today. After months on end when no-one else was around while I was shooting, today everyone and their granny seemed to be out. Yesterday it rained – boy, did it rain – all day, in quantities of Biblical proportions. Today has been much more pleasant and I guess that has attracted people out again. The fords can also be pretty spectacular after heavy rain and people go down there to take pictures. Surprisingly, despite yesterday’s monsoon-like downpour the water in the ford was just under twelve inches (I have seen it before hit three feet, and that is certainly scary), nevertheless deep enough, and more to the point, fast flowing enough, to prompt a couple of cars to turn back.
What of the assignment itself? Looking back over the past year I find it all a little bit strange. This is quite a big project and one that had to be committed to very early on while working on this module. There was no real scope for a change of mind, of direction, or subject matter along the way. As the point at which work had to start on this assignment was so early it was a bit of a shot in the dark. At the time it started I did not really know where I was going with anything to do with landscape photography. There was still a lot of material to read, other photographs to be taken, and more importantly, thoughts about landscape photography and what it means to me to be developed. When I started this sequence I did not fully understand my own thoughts about landscape photography. The themes and ideas that I have explored subsequently had not really started to evolve and take on a more concrete, and coherent, form. That did not really happen until I started to think about spaces/places and work on Assignment 3. It is really only over time that a sense of theoretical underpinning and background for this last project has emerged and developed. The ideas behind what I have been exploring and trying to do in relation to landscape photography have probably always been there, although they have taken time to solidify, and that is perhaps why after a year I feel this project does still fit within my overall thinking.
Would I have done anything different if from the outset I was more conscious of what landscape means to me? An impossible question of course, purely rhetorical, but I think probably not, if only because of the limited options that have been available.
Does it work? Yes, I think so, though I am far from convinced it is the most interesting piece of work I have done. Assignments 3 and 5 are more interesting in themselves and more directly illustrative of the ideas I have been trying to articulate. This is perhaps another effect of having started this project so early on. I will though for now postpone any further judgment or reflection upon it until I have finalised the slideshows, of which more anon.
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 