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Sense of Place
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GLADMAN
950 posts

Re: Sense of Place
Apr 01, 2012, 20:00
'The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible' - Oscar Wilde.

Love that quote... since I reckon every prehistoric monument I've ever been to has been an attempt by the community which built it to explain why things are as they are and - the key point - to reassure themselves that things aren't suddenly going to change. If we could satisfy ourselves as to why the sun sits in the sky ripening the crops, why the moon returns night after night, a glowing ball of light.... why the blackbird acts so differently from the starling, from the finch, we could look forward to stability, continuity, a world to pass on to the children. Understanding. Are we so different nowadays? Clearly mankind has always had this inquisitive 'need to know why', which is why I find religions quoting 'the final meaning of life, period' so distasteful... to put it mildly. Accepting a 'final' metaphysical explanation just because the answer currently lies beyond our comprehension is the easy, lazy way out. I reckon every new generation has a duty to push the boundaries of our perception that little bit further. To explain what's there, not what's not there.

'Sense of place', for me, is all about a location's relationship with 'what's there' (incidentally, apologies for all the inverted commas.... if I had the proper terms I'd use them), not only the life-giving river down below, the cloud forming mountain rising above, but the sun in the impossibly immense sky, the equally immense night sky free from all the light pollution we so take for granted, the animals migrating and returning at the same time every year etc. For me it really is all too wondrous for words, but only when I'm out of town and the brain has the chance to filter out all the 'noise' and try and really focus. Which is perhaps why the high places have always really 'done it' for me. Nothing but you and raw Nature. Oh and - more often than not - the great cairn or barrow remining you that people have been up here ages before myself trying to fathom the same puzzles. We are but the latest.

Incidentally many thanks for the kind words Moss. Although I am no way strong enough to carry the sort of tripod which would warrant a better camera, I do try and compensate for lack of technical quality by looking to capture something of what I feel in my images. A 'sense of place', if you like.

'The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera...' Dorothea Lange
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