See more of these below the November thought piece post. These are just scans from the 
negatives, displayed in a prett
y fashion.
negatives, displayed in a prett
y fashion.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Thought Piece for Nov. 1
You Can’t Go Home Again:
A Personal Investigation of Place and Landscape
Note: upon re-reading this paper just prior to submission, I realize that there are a multitude of themes and ideas expressed here, none of which are fleshed out to a satisfactory level. I believe this is because I write this soon after my trip to Gettysburg, at a time when I am still trying to make sense of all of the thoughts I had while there and just upon my return. I make this statement so that the reader knows I am aware of these issues and that I fully intend to explore them in more detail in the near future.
In mid-October of this year, my fiancée and I took a trip to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the site of one of the most pivotal and bloody battles of the American Civil War. During the three-day struggle there in early July, 1863, nearly 51,000 soldiers in the Northern and Southern ranks, and one lone civilian, became casualties. The reason for our journey to this place which is often referred to as hallowed ground was twofold: Sarah, my fiancée, is an ardent Civil War buff who spent our three days there vigilantly attempting to find each of the over 1,400 monuments and markers scattered around the battlefields. For me, the main reason for the visit was to try to take a trip back into time; not back to 1863 and the time of the battle, but to the 1980s when I was a boy growing up in a town adjacent to Gettysburg. Except for a very brief return to the area in 2003 for my grandmother’s funeral, I had not explored Gettysburg and my old hometown since I was twelve years old. I wanted to know if this place, one of the most visited and studied landscapes in America, retained not only the history of significant human events, but my own personal history as well.
“An object or place achieves concrete reality when our experience of it is total, that is, through all the senses as well as with the active and reflective mind. Long residence enables us to know a place intimately, yet its image may lack sharpness unless we can also see it from the outside and reflect upon our experience.”[1]
Perhaps because I have moved frequently in my life, I have a longstanding interest in what a person considers home and how their surroundings can affect their lives and memories. Before our journey to Gettysburg, I decided to do some research on how more intelligent people than I define space, place, and landscape. I began by reading Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience by geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. When he speaks of places and spaces in his book, he refers to two different and very specific things. He states, “‘Space’ is more abstract than ‘place.’ What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.”[2] Place is important because it signifies security and familiarity. Our homes, the towns we live in, the landmarks we visit regularly whether they be a supermarket or a state park, are places that become concrete in our minds because we have lived with them. Spaces, or the vast expanses of area we do not have such an intimate relationship with, have importance too; they represent the freedom that the human body requires. A space is a different kind of comfort, one that lets us know we are not trapped.
Children experience place and space, and also time, quite differently than adults. This has to do with the development of the child, including age, size, and basic understanding of his or her physical presence and surroundings. Tuan states, “Feeling for place is influenced by knowledge, by knowing such basic facts as whether the place is natural or man-made and whether it is relatively large or small. A child five or six years old lacks this kind of knowledge. He may talk excitedly about the city of Geneva or Lake Geneva, but his appreciation of these places is certain to differ radically from that of an informed adult.”[3] I experienced a phenomenon like this during my recent visit to PA when stopping to look at the house I grew up in. As a child I believed the hillside our house was on to be huge. Taking a sled down the hill in the winter was akin to riding the world’s largest roller coaster. Now as an adult when I look at the house it appears to be resting on top of a tiny molehill. For a moment I even thought I was at the wrong house because I was expecting the hill to be much larger. The battlefields at Gettysburg were more than anything else a playground for me when I was a child. My mother took me there as sort of a “day off” for us, where we would walk around the woods, scramble around the large boulder field of Devil’s Den (my favorite part), climb some monuments and viewing towers, and explore some of the more interesting tourist traps in town, such the Civil War Wax Museum. While I understood in a vague sense that an important event happened here and I knew some of the facts, none of that was important to me at the time. Yi-Fu Tuan’s comment about a feeling for place being influenced by knowledge comes into play here. I appreciated areas of the battlefield at Gettysburg not on a knowledge-based, historical level, but on a sensual level. I still remember the fond experience of working my way in between the boulders at Devil’s Den, and had a similar wave of thrill wash over me when doing the same thing during my trip this fall. However, this time the experience had a broader context than it did when I was a child. I could now imagine Union and Confederate soldiers scrambling around this area as artillery rounds exploded around them. I could envision the land before the battle, just another quiet patchwork of fields and pastures indistinguishable from any other farmland by anyone but the local residents. And I could analyze how this place has been immortalized (and commercialized) since the war. These ideas mixed in with my personal memories of the place from my childhood and the ways in which the region has changed since, and has made untangling these threads of thought and time quite a complex process.
The concept of time can be compared to a landscape, and a landscape is affected, physically and in a person’s mind, by time. As discussed, a child’s understanding of landscape is skewed by lack of knowledge. Attributes as simple as a place’s size can be misread by children. Similarly, a child’s idea of the passage of time is different from an adult. According to Tuan, “To the young child time does not ‘flow’; he stands as it were outside it, remaining at the same tender age seemingly forever. To the grown person time rushes on, propelling him forward willy-nilly. Since small children are seldom able to reflect on their experiences and describe them, we need to make use of the recall and observations of adults.”[4] While I would have liked Tuan to be more specific about what he means by “small children” (as an educator of children of a broad range of ages, I find that many are quite able to speak of their experiences in rather eloquent ways; in fact, they are often more honest about their feelings than adults), I agree with his assertion that children experience time in their own way. To children up to adolescent age, the world is in a state of present. Tuan paraphrases playwright Eugene Ionesco’s description of this phenomenon thusly: “At the age of eight or nine, everything for him was joy and presentness. Time seemed a rhythm in space. The seasons did not mark the passage of a year; rather they spread out in space…At fifteen or sixteen it was all over. He was in time, in flight, in finiteness; the present had disappeared. There was nothing left for him but a past and a tomorrow, a tomorrow that he was already conscious of as past.”[5] My own childhood in Pennsylvania was fraught with particular characters and events that I do not wish to trouble the reader with here, nor do I want it to be the focus of any artwork produced while exploring the theme of landscape and place. I feel I must make mention of it in a nebulous manner, though, for the reader to understand why I was so compelled to return here as an adult. I experienced the rocky divorce of my parents here, and also had a very difficult time socially in school. Being bullied and teased were part of a regular daily routine for me, and for various reasons I did not build up the social defenses to combat it properly. Upon returning to the area this October, I was not sure what to expect. I thought perhaps that highly charged memories of troubling childhood moments would flood back, but they didn’t. While many places were familiar and I could even point at nondescript areas along the roads and paths and say, “that happened here,” I never felt overly emotional about it. There were no butterflies in the stomach, and no movie-style childhood flashbacks. Even when driving by my old elementary school I had no strong emotions flood over me. This was a bit surprising, and left me somehow disappointed at the time. Does this mean that my childhood experiences have no meaning to me any longer? Or does it mean that through the passage of time and my own development into adulthood – now with a fiancée, a house in the country, pets, and many of the elements that I think of as being a complete “home” – I have been able to start putting my old view of the past away and start thinking of it in new contexts?
“Memory is stratified. If we have seen a place through many years, each view, no matter how banal, is a palimpsest.”[6]
In her book, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, Lucy Lippard discusses the idea of place while providing a multitude of examples of contemporary artists who use their work to highlight social, cultural, and political issues regarding the landscape. According to her, “The changing landscape is created by the replacement of some people, the displacement of others, and the disappearance of ways of life paradoxically envied by those who have come to emulate them but, by their very arrival, actually destroy them.”[7] This can be a large-scale phenomenon, such as the near-obliteration of Native Americans and the subsequent romanticizing of their cultures in our own pop culture. The change can also be more subtle. In the 1980s Gettysburg was what one might call a “tourist trap,” with its fair share of chintzy souvenir shops and family attractions adjacent to the battlefields. However, the surrounding landscape was relatively lightly populated with acres of sprawling farmlands. Upon my visit this October the touristy nature of Gettysburg had not changed, but the area around it was quite different. Due to the increased difficulty that family-run farms have found in staying financially afloat and the recent “real estate bubble,” many of those acres of farmland are now subdivided and supporting planned communities. The towns near Gettysburg, including my former hometown Littlestown, are growing. And of course, wherever people settle there will also be a need, or call, for businesses. Gettysburg is now home to an outlet store mall and a multitude of chain retail stores that were not there when I was growing up. There has even been a recent attempt by a businessman to build a casino on the outskirts of town (those plans have all but been squashed, though, by a large group of local people and historians who did not wish the area to be harmed by such a business).
The battlefields of Gettysburg are changing at a rapid pace as well. In recent years there has been a push to restore the battlefields to how they looked during the 1860s. A large steel lookout tower that loomed over the town was demolished recently because it was an eyesore to many and was visible from nearly every major battle site. Now the National Park Service is busy working on the battlefields themselves. As a child I remember Devil's Den and the area behind it sprouting with many trees and bushes. All of this is being cleared away to make it look like the pastureland of 150 years ago and to give visitors a better sense of what the soldiers would have seen. I think I understand the reasoning, but it still strikes me as odd. They're making artificial pastureland. No cow or horse is ever really going to graze here again. It's almost as if the land itself has become a reenactor of the Civil War. It is an oddity because it is one of the few cherished landscapes in America, or the world, that is being restored not for environmental or conservation purposes but for the purpose of preserving a very particular point in time – three days in 1863, to be exact – in which a fleeting, albeit bloody, human interaction occurred. Ironically, there has been no talk of removing the hundreds upon hundreds of marble and granite monuments, which of course were not original elements of the land during the battle. It reminds me of a story about the folk art painter Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses, who was once commissioned to paint a historical scene of a Revolutionary War battle in Bennington, Vermont. Amidst the buildings and small soldiers in red and blue coats she painted, she also included an image of the Bennington Monument, a pillar-like object in the center of town that was erected later to memorialize the battle. Grandma Moses was ridiculed for this anachronism to the point where she felt compelled to make a second painting of the battle, minus the monument.
While in Gettysburg I photographed the battlefield landscapes – roads, monuments, and sometimes tourists included – with a small 35mm half-frame camera. This camera takes twice the usual number of pictures on a roll of film by chopping each 35mm frame in half. I have found that the camera is quite useful for making interesting “panoramas” of the landscape. By simply panning the landscape in front of me while winding and shooting, I create a series of images that I believe give, in a sense, a more accurate view of how a person views a landscape than what a traditional panoramic camera can produce. Panoramic cameras focus on a continuous stretch of landscape; from end to end, the image maintains its visual integrity without focal or spatial interruptions. While effective and interesting, these images do not represent a landscape as it is seen by the human eye. Peripheral and stereo vision prevents eyes from being able to record an entire landscape in focus at once. The eyes focus on one particular point at a time, scanning the scene and stitching the landscape together in the mind. The half-frame camera method that I am using to record the landscape mimics this “stitching” by presenting the scene in sections. Objects within the landscape repeat between frames, further revealing the effect of stitching and also elongating the scene, making it appear more sweeping than it is in true life. If one were inclined, the viewer could also interpret the separate images as soldiers in line for battle.
“If place is defined by memory, but no one who remembers is left to bring these memories to the surface, does a place become noplace, or only a landscape?”[8]
What began as an investigation of my own history has evolved into a curiosity of how the landscape records the history of events, large and small, and how our Western sense of what a landscape is can influence memory and behavior. This can be shortened to the basic question of, “How is a landscape remembered?” I intend to explore this question, using the recently-made photographs of Gettysburg as a starting point. I will be printing these images on sheets of glass using liquid photographic emulsion, leaving open the possibility of viewing other images through these “transparent landscapes,” creating a palimpsest of sorts. Perhaps these other images will be photographs of my new home in upstate New York, photographs of landscapes I took as a child, or reproductions of photographs taken by Matthew Brady and Timothy O’Sullivan in Gettysburg shortly after the 1863 battle. As research is continued and feedback is received from professors and fellow artists, I will begin to make my decisions.
[1] Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 18.
[2] Ibid, 6.
[3] Ibid, 32.
[4] Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 185.
[5] Eugene Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal (London: Allen & Unwin, 1952), 55; paraphrased in Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 186.
[6] Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1997), 33.
[7] Ibid, 43.
[8] Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1997), 23.
A Personal Investigation of Place and Landscape
Note: upon re-reading this paper just prior to submission, I realize that there are a multitude of themes and ideas expressed here, none of which are fleshed out to a satisfactory level. I believe this is because I write this soon after my trip to Gettysburg, at a time when I am still trying to make sense of all of the thoughts I had while there and just upon my return. I make this statement so that the reader knows I am aware of these issues and that I fully intend to explore them in more detail in the near future.
In mid-October of this year, my fiancée and I took a trip to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the site of one of the most pivotal and bloody battles of the American Civil War. During the three-day struggle there in early July, 1863, nearly 51,000 soldiers in the Northern and Southern ranks, and one lone civilian, became casualties. The reason for our journey to this place which is often referred to as hallowed ground was twofold: Sarah, my fiancée, is an ardent Civil War buff who spent our three days there vigilantly attempting to find each of the over 1,400 monuments and markers scattered around the battlefields. For me, the main reason for the visit was to try to take a trip back into time; not back to 1863 and the time of the battle, but to the 1980s when I was a boy growing up in a town adjacent to Gettysburg. Except for a very brief return to the area in 2003 for my grandmother’s funeral, I had not explored Gettysburg and my old hometown since I was twelve years old. I wanted to know if this place, one of the most visited and studied landscapes in America, retained not only the history of significant human events, but my own personal history as well.
“An object or place achieves concrete reality when our experience of it is total, that is, through all the senses as well as with the active and reflective mind. Long residence enables us to know a place intimately, yet its image may lack sharpness unless we can also see it from the outside and reflect upon our experience.”[1]
Perhaps because I have moved frequently in my life, I have a longstanding interest in what a person considers home and how their surroundings can affect their lives and memories. Before our journey to Gettysburg, I decided to do some research on how more intelligent people than I define space, place, and landscape. I began by reading Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience by geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. When he speaks of places and spaces in his book, he refers to two different and very specific things. He states, “‘Space’ is more abstract than ‘place.’ What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.”[2] Place is important because it signifies security and familiarity. Our homes, the towns we live in, the landmarks we visit regularly whether they be a supermarket or a state park, are places that become concrete in our minds because we have lived with them. Spaces, or the vast expanses of area we do not have such an intimate relationship with, have importance too; they represent the freedom that the human body requires. A space is a different kind of comfort, one that lets us know we are not trapped.
Children experience place and space, and also time, quite differently than adults. This has to do with the development of the child, including age, size, and basic understanding of his or her physical presence and surroundings. Tuan states, “Feeling for place is influenced by knowledge, by knowing such basic facts as whether the place is natural or man-made and whether it is relatively large or small. A child five or six years old lacks this kind of knowledge. He may talk excitedly about the city of Geneva or Lake Geneva, but his appreciation of these places is certain to differ radically from that of an informed adult.”[3] I experienced a phenomenon like this during my recent visit to PA when stopping to look at the house I grew up in. As a child I believed the hillside our house was on to be huge. Taking a sled down the hill in the winter was akin to riding the world’s largest roller coaster. Now as an adult when I look at the house it appears to be resting on top of a tiny molehill. For a moment I even thought I was at the wrong house because I was expecting the hill to be much larger. The battlefields at Gettysburg were more than anything else a playground for me when I was a child. My mother took me there as sort of a “day off” for us, where we would walk around the woods, scramble around the large boulder field of Devil’s Den (my favorite part), climb some monuments and viewing towers, and explore some of the more interesting tourist traps in town, such the Civil War Wax Museum. While I understood in a vague sense that an important event happened here and I knew some of the facts, none of that was important to me at the time. Yi-Fu Tuan’s comment about a feeling for place being influenced by knowledge comes into play here. I appreciated areas of the battlefield at Gettysburg not on a knowledge-based, historical level, but on a sensual level. I still remember the fond experience of working my way in between the boulders at Devil’s Den, and had a similar wave of thrill wash over me when doing the same thing during my trip this fall. However, this time the experience had a broader context than it did when I was a child. I could now imagine Union and Confederate soldiers scrambling around this area as artillery rounds exploded around them. I could envision the land before the battle, just another quiet patchwork of fields and pastures indistinguishable from any other farmland by anyone but the local residents. And I could analyze how this place has been immortalized (and commercialized) since the war. These ideas mixed in with my personal memories of the place from my childhood and the ways in which the region has changed since, and has made untangling these threads of thought and time quite a complex process.
The concept of time can be compared to a landscape, and a landscape is affected, physically and in a person’s mind, by time. As discussed, a child’s understanding of landscape is skewed by lack of knowledge. Attributes as simple as a place’s size can be misread by children. Similarly, a child’s idea of the passage of time is different from an adult. According to Tuan, “To the young child time does not ‘flow’; he stands as it were outside it, remaining at the same tender age seemingly forever. To the grown person time rushes on, propelling him forward willy-nilly. Since small children are seldom able to reflect on their experiences and describe them, we need to make use of the recall and observations of adults.”[4] While I would have liked Tuan to be more specific about what he means by “small children” (as an educator of children of a broad range of ages, I find that many are quite able to speak of their experiences in rather eloquent ways; in fact, they are often more honest about their feelings than adults), I agree with his assertion that children experience time in their own way. To children up to adolescent age, the world is in a state of present. Tuan paraphrases playwright Eugene Ionesco’s description of this phenomenon thusly: “At the age of eight or nine, everything for him was joy and presentness. Time seemed a rhythm in space. The seasons did not mark the passage of a year; rather they spread out in space…At fifteen or sixteen it was all over. He was in time, in flight, in finiteness; the present had disappeared. There was nothing left for him but a past and a tomorrow, a tomorrow that he was already conscious of as past.”[5] My own childhood in Pennsylvania was fraught with particular characters and events that I do not wish to trouble the reader with here, nor do I want it to be the focus of any artwork produced while exploring the theme of landscape and place. I feel I must make mention of it in a nebulous manner, though, for the reader to understand why I was so compelled to return here as an adult. I experienced the rocky divorce of my parents here, and also had a very difficult time socially in school. Being bullied and teased were part of a regular daily routine for me, and for various reasons I did not build up the social defenses to combat it properly. Upon returning to the area this October, I was not sure what to expect. I thought perhaps that highly charged memories of troubling childhood moments would flood back, but they didn’t. While many places were familiar and I could even point at nondescript areas along the roads and paths and say, “that happened here,” I never felt overly emotional about it. There were no butterflies in the stomach, and no movie-style childhood flashbacks. Even when driving by my old elementary school I had no strong emotions flood over me. This was a bit surprising, and left me somehow disappointed at the time. Does this mean that my childhood experiences have no meaning to me any longer? Or does it mean that through the passage of time and my own development into adulthood – now with a fiancée, a house in the country, pets, and many of the elements that I think of as being a complete “home” – I have been able to start putting my old view of the past away and start thinking of it in new contexts?
“Memory is stratified. If we have seen a place through many years, each view, no matter how banal, is a palimpsest.”[6]
In her book, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, Lucy Lippard discusses the idea of place while providing a multitude of examples of contemporary artists who use their work to highlight social, cultural, and political issues regarding the landscape. According to her, “The changing landscape is created by the replacement of some people, the displacement of others, and the disappearance of ways of life paradoxically envied by those who have come to emulate them but, by their very arrival, actually destroy them.”[7] This can be a large-scale phenomenon, such as the near-obliteration of Native Americans and the subsequent romanticizing of their cultures in our own pop culture. The change can also be more subtle. In the 1980s Gettysburg was what one might call a “tourist trap,” with its fair share of chintzy souvenir shops and family attractions adjacent to the battlefields. However, the surrounding landscape was relatively lightly populated with acres of sprawling farmlands. Upon my visit this October the touristy nature of Gettysburg had not changed, but the area around it was quite different. Due to the increased difficulty that family-run farms have found in staying financially afloat and the recent “real estate bubble,” many of those acres of farmland are now subdivided and supporting planned communities. The towns near Gettysburg, including my former hometown Littlestown, are growing. And of course, wherever people settle there will also be a need, or call, for businesses. Gettysburg is now home to an outlet store mall and a multitude of chain retail stores that were not there when I was growing up. There has even been a recent attempt by a businessman to build a casino on the outskirts of town (those plans have all but been squashed, though, by a large group of local people and historians who did not wish the area to be harmed by such a business).
The battlefields of Gettysburg are changing at a rapid pace as well. In recent years there has been a push to restore the battlefields to how they looked during the 1860s. A large steel lookout tower that loomed over the town was demolished recently because it was an eyesore to many and was visible from nearly every major battle site. Now the National Park Service is busy working on the battlefields themselves. As a child I remember Devil's Den and the area behind it sprouting with many trees and bushes. All of this is being cleared away to make it look like the pastureland of 150 years ago and to give visitors a better sense of what the soldiers would have seen. I think I understand the reasoning, but it still strikes me as odd. They're making artificial pastureland. No cow or horse is ever really going to graze here again. It's almost as if the land itself has become a reenactor of the Civil War. It is an oddity because it is one of the few cherished landscapes in America, or the world, that is being restored not for environmental or conservation purposes but for the purpose of preserving a very particular point in time – three days in 1863, to be exact – in which a fleeting, albeit bloody, human interaction occurred. Ironically, there has been no talk of removing the hundreds upon hundreds of marble and granite monuments, which of course were not original elements of the land during the battle. It reminds me of a story about the folk art painter Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”) Moses, who was once commissioned to paint a historical scene of a Revolutionary War battle in Bennington, Vermont. Amidst the buildings and small soldiers in red and blue coats she painted, she also included an image of the Bennington Monument, a pillar-like object in the center of town that was erected later to memorialize the battle. Grandma Moses was ridiculed for this anachronism to the point where she felt compelled to make a second painting of the battle, minus the monument.
While in Gettysburg I photographed the battlefield landscapes – roads, monuments, and sometimes tourists included – with a small 35mm half-frame camera. This camera takes twice the usual number of pictures on a roll of film by chopping each 35mm frame in half. I have found that the camera is quite useful for making interesting “panoramas” of the landscape. By simply panning the landscape in front of me while winding and shooting, I create a series of images that I believe give, in a sense, a more accurate view of how a person views a landscape than what a traditional panoramic camera can produce. Panoramic cameras focus on a continuous stretch of landscape; from end to end, the image maintains its visual integrity without focal or spatial interruptions. While effective and interesting, these images do not represent a landscape as it is seen by the human eye. Peripheral and stereo vision prevents eyes from being able to record an entire landscape in focus at once. The eyes focus on one particular point at a time, scanning the scene and stitching the landscape together in the mind. The half-frame camera method that I am using to record the landscape mimics this “stitching” by presenting the scene in sections. Objects within the landscape repeat between frames, further revealing the effect of stitching and also elongating the scene, making it appear more sweeping than it is in true life. If one were inclined, the viewer could also interpret the separate images as soldiers in line for battle.
“If place is defined by memory, but no one who remembers is left to bring these memories to the surface, does a place become noplace, or only a landscape?”[8]
What began as an investigation of my own history has evolved into a curiosity of how the landscape records the history of events, large and small, and how our Western sense of what a landscape is can influence memory and behavior. This can be shortened to the basic question of, “How is a landscape remembered?” I intend to explore this question, using the recently-made photographs of Gettysburg as a starting point. I will be printing these images on sheets of glass using liquid photographic emulsion, leaving open the possibility of viewing other images through these “transparent landscapes,” creating a palimpsest of sorts. Perhaps these other images will be photographs of my new home in upstate New York, photographs of landscapes I took as a child, or reproductions of photographs taken by Matthew Brady and Timothy O’Sullivan in Gettysburg shortly after the 1863 battle. As research is continued and feedback is received from professors and fellow artists, I will begin to make my decisions.
[1] Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 18.
[2] Ibid, 6.
[3] Ibid, 32.
[4] Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 185.
[5] Eugene Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal (London: Allen & Unwin, 1952), 55; paraphrased in Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 186.
[6] Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1997), 33.
[7] Ibid, 43.
[8] Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1997), 23.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Whoever first said, "you can't go home again..."
...deserves a big, fat, wet kiss for being absolutely right. Sarah and I came back from our trip to Gettysburg, PA, on Monday. We spent three days there; Sarah courageously tried to find all the monuments scattered around the battlefields (there's over 1,000 of them, and Sarah's a Civil War nut. She may even someday join those wacky reenactors), while I photographed and tried to drum up old memories. I grew up in Littlestown, right next to Gettysburg. It's where I lived with my mom and grandmother, while my father came to pick me up every other weekend and take me to Harrisburg. Mom and I used to go to the battlefield a lot, which at my age was more like a playground. I loved to scramble around the boulders at Devil's Den, not even giving a thought to the people who died there 120 years prior. I also visited the house I grew up in (now painted a different color and minus the multitude of trees that once nearly obliterated it from view from the road) and, for the first time, my grandmother and grandfather's grave. Grandma died in 2003, and I never met my grandfather. He died back in the 60's.
I wasn't sure what to expect going back. I thought maybe that highly charged memories of an often rocky childhood would flood back, but they didn't. While many things were familiar and I could even point at nondescript areas along the roads and paths and say "that happened to me here," I never felt overly emotional about it. No butterflies in the stomach. No movie-style childhood flashbacks where I zoned out for minutes on end. I was, at best, at peace with it all, and at worst, just plain neutral about the whole thing.
Maybe part of it is because the area around Gettysburg has changed since I was a kid. The town has always been pretty commercial and tourist-oriented, but now it's also homogenized. Many of the outlying farms are divvying up their land and selling it to developers, so there's a whole slew of those ugly, lifeless, residential communities springing up. Littlestown is not so little anymore. A McDonald's is being built near the center of town. The school I used to go to, and where I had a rough time with bullying as a kid, has expanded - a lot. Overall the area just seemed to have lost some of its quietness and originality, real or imagined.
The battlefields are even changing. In recent years there has been a push to restore the battlefields to how they looked during the 1860s. As a child I remember Devil's Den and the area behind it sprouted with youngish trees and bushes. That has all been cleared away to make it look like the pastureland of 150 years ago and to give visitors a more "authentic" view of what the soldiers would have seen. I think I understand the reasoning, but it still strikes me as odd. They're making artificial pastureland. No cow or horse is ever really going to graze here again. It's almost as if the land itself has become a reenactor of the Civil War.
So anyway, while there I used my half-frame camera (it takes half-size pictures on a roll of 35mm film; you get twice pictures for your dollar! And of course this highly practical camera is Russian) to make "panoramic" images of the battlefields. This was done by standing in one place and making a series of images as I panned the scene in front of me. You can see some earlier versions of this technique in a blog post I made a couple of months ago. I like the jerky look of the panoramas, the way the horizon sometimes jumps or objects are seen twice between photos. To me it's a more realisic way of seeing a full landscape than an official Panoramic camera records it. Your eyes can only focus on one point in a scene at a time. To get a sweeping view, you need to pan it with your eyes, looking at it in sections while your mind "stitches" them together in a way. Try it sometime. Look outside. Where are your eyes focused? What else in that scene is just part of your blurry peripheral until you move your eyes to the left or right?
I have no idea yet how or if these panoramas (I'll hopefully scan the negatives and post some images soon) will play into my work, and how or if I'm going to connect them to my memories and my feelings. No doubt, though, it will be a part of a larger monthly paper down the road. In the meantime, it's back to daily life in upstate NY, filling our heating oil tank with $700 worth of fuel, and taking care of two kitten brothers who were mysteriously orphaned on our doorstep. We've named them Calvin and Hobbes.
I wasn't sure what to expect going back. I thought maybe that highly charged memories of an often rocky childhood would flood back, but they didn't. While many things were familiar and I could even point at nondescript areas along the roads and paths and say "that happened to me here," I never felt overly emotional about it. No butterflies in the stomach. No movie-style childhood flashbacks where I zoned out for minutes on end. I was, at best, at peace with it all, and at worst, just plain neutral about the whole thing.
Maybe part of it is because the area around Gettysburg has changed since I was a kid. The town has always been pretty commercial and tourist-oriented, but now it's also homogenized. Many of the outlying farms are divvying up their land and selling it to developers, so there's a whole slew of those ugly, lifeless, residential communities springing up. Littlestown is not so little anymore. A McDonald's is being built near the center of town. The school I used to go to, and where I had a rough time with bullying as a kid, has expanded - a lot. Overall the area just seemed to have lost some of its quietness and originality, real or imagined.
The battlefields are even changing. In recent years there has been a push to restore the battlefields to how they looked during the 1860s. As a child I remember Devil's Den and the area behind it sprouted with youngish trees and bushes. That has all been cleared away to make it look like the pastureland of 150 years ago and to give visitors a more "authentic" view of what the soldiers would have seen. I think I understand the reasoning, but it still strikes me as odd. They're making artificial pastureland. No cow or horse is ever really going to graze here again. It's almost as if the land itself has become a reenactor of the Civil War.
So anyway, while there I used my half-frame camera (it takes half-size pictures on a roll of 35mm film; you get twice pictures for your dollar! And of course this highly practical camera is Russian) to make "panoramic" images of the battlefields. This was done by standing in one place and making a series of images as I panned the scene in front of me. You can see some earlier versions of this technique in a blog post I made a couple of months ago. I like the jerky look of the panoramas, the way the horizon sometimes jumps or objects are seen twice between photos. To me it's a more realisic way of seeing a full landscape than an official Panoramic camera records it. Your eyes can only focus on one point in a scene at a time. To get a sweeping view, you need to pan it with your eyes, looking at it in sections while your mind "stitches" them together in a way. Try it sometime. Look outside. Where are your eyes focused? What else in that scene is just part of your blurry peripheral until you move your eyes to the left or right?
I have no idea yet how or if these panoramas (I'll hopefully scan the negatives and post some images soon) will play into my work, and how or if I'm going to connect them to my memories and my feelings. No doubt, though, it will be a part of a larger monthly paper down the road. In the meantime, it's back to daily life in upstate NY, filling our heating oil tank with $700 worth of fuel, and taking care of two kitten brothers who were mysteriously orphaned on our doorstep. We've named them Calvin and Hobbes.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Maybe it IS pre-emptive kitsch...
...in a way. Looking back at my thought paper for the month, a quote by Roger Scruton stands out:
“Through family, religion, and the forms of public life, we shield ourselves from the horrific vision that surrounds us—the vision of ourselves as fakes."
In a way, I am creating a "vision of ourselves as fakes" by using mannequins as sort of stand-ins for real people. Does this fact automatically make my work
a.)true kitsch
b.)preemptive kitsch, or
c.)some kind of comment on kitsch that avoids either one?
Let's hope that C is the right answer!
“Through family, religion, and the forms of public life, we shield ourselves from the horrific vision that surrounds us—the vision of ourselves as fakes."
In a way, I am creating a "vision of ourselves as fakes" by using mannequins as sort of stand-ins for real people. Does this fact automatically make my work
a.)true kitsch
b.)preemptive kitsch, or
c.)some kind of comment on kitsch that avoids either one?
Let's hope that C is the right answer!
Monday, October 1, 2007
And now for something non-MFA related...
This just made me so in-the-pants happy that I had to relate it to anyone else who likes Radiohead or just hates the way record companies make us shell out 18 bucks for a new CD: Radiohead is releasing their new album, In Rainbows, as an mp3 download from their site. Ok, that's cool, but get this - you pay whatever you think the album is worth. Want the album for $18? Ok. Wanna spend 37 cents instead? Go for it. How about downloading it for free? Well, you can do that too. If this doesn't change the way record companies do business, nothing will.
Check it out:
http://www.inrainbows.com
Check it out:
http://www.inrainbows.com
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