Some additional place-laden photography from Matiu/Somes Island, situated in Wellington Harbour.
photography
Place through the lens: Matiu/Somes Island
Some photography from Matiu/Somes Island, in Wellington Harbour. With its deep and complex history, relative abundance of protected native flora and fauna, and unique location – positioned within the midst of a significant urban area yet effectively isolated – this island location always provides a strong sense of its place for me.
Place through the lens: Kaikoura
In a previous blog, I referenced a visit to the Kaikoura Peninsula two years ago.
Some additional images from that trip, to convey my sense of that place.
Place through the lens: Baring Head
Photography from the Wainuiomata Coast at Baring Head south of Wellington, New Zealand.
A deeply held, if episodic, place link to this stretch of dark sand, which intended or not, these images help capture for me.
Place through the lens: Farewell Spit
Some more photography portraying a location rich for me with sense of place, Farewell Spit on the South Island, New Zealand.
A gracefully curving arc of sand extending like a Kiwi’s beak around the northern perimeter of Golden Bay, this unique location encapsulates for me place persistent in the face of change.
Shaped and re-shaped continuously by wind and waves, this fragile geography perseveres in itself and in fact in its impermanence finds and offers its locational identity.
Place through the lens
In a previous post I extolled the virtues of the highly personal, in situ engagement with a location as critical to a genuine experience of place. In light of that, what follows may very well read as a contradiction. Maybe it is. Maybe it’s a new perspective that reflects a fundamental shift in my thinking. Considering the challenges involved with capturing the ethereal nature of place, that would not be completely unexpected.
For the same reason though, contradiction seems an overly simplistic assessment. It feels more like evolution. And as things evolve and while in the process of settling, they may appear for a time to contradict themselves. Suggesting then that locations must be directly experienced to generate the most visceral sense of place is not necessarily at odds with the notion that sense of place arising from the visual portrayal of a location in a photograph is likewise sincere and powerful.
The latter idea certainly bears further investigation. A significant driver behind this blog afterall is a consideration of the potential role of photography within the broader idea of place.
For me photographs have long been an important and particularly potent conjurer of place. They are in fact often a singularly critical catalyst supporting the emergence of a sense of place for locations from which I am physically removed. These might be places never visited, or more often, places to which I had traveled some time in the past. The images in these cases often supersede my own memories as a source of a strong place sense.
Therein lies a peculiar power of photography – the ability to stimulate a displaced sense of place.
More than that, photographs can add a whole new dimension to the experience of place, expanding its potential and opening it to novel applications where it might not otherwise have even been considered.
And it’s surprising to me how strong, on occasion, that photography-induced sense of place can be. I suppose it’s not fair to directly compare it to an in situ experience, as it is something altogether different, but it can be compelling nonetheless. My reaction to a photograph in this regard can be quite intuitional and highly emotional, striking something deep within that links me to the portrayed location.
This is all triggered of course by vision, and as such I think anyone would struggle to properly convey the result in words. With photography it is the images themselves that determine levels of response and I think it best therefore for the purposes of any place discussion focused on imagery to keep words to a minimum.
What follows then in this blog and others to come, is a selection of my photographs that for me properly evoke the sense of place I experienced while in various locations. As such they provide me a new level of meaning beyond that which I experienced while there, and perhaps just as importantly help shore up my memory against the erosional effects of time, allowing me to retain and keep that place sense long after I’ve left the location behind.
What’s even more amazing to me is that in some cases the photographs create in me a whole new sense of place. This emerges I believe from a consideration of the location through a specific perspective – maybe with a particular focus on lighting or shadow or pattern, or the removal of ambient sounds and tactile experience and all of the other things that influence in situ sense of place.
So far from undermining the emotional engagement with locations experienced while situated within them, the captured image can in fact add new emotional contexts, all generated from vision alone. The record of the eye, presented through the avenue of a camera lens and in its isolation, opens new doors into the space.
Displaced place via photography and in situ place are hardly mutually exclusive. They are in fact complementary. Taken together they have the potential to instill an even deeper, richer sense of place, striking at many more emotional chords than is possible with either individually.
Here then a few images of mine, taken on New Zealand’s Otago Peninsula, to illustrate the point.
Definitions
There is a need to formally start this commentary somewhere and it seems appropriate to begin with definitions. How then to define place?
It’s no easy task I’ve found, but one can certainly start with the tried and true. Dictionary definitions.
Here are a few, randomly collected online:
- “a particular position, point, or area in space; a location”
- “a portion of space designated or available for or being used by someone”
- “a specific area or region of the world: a particular city, country, etc.”
All of these seem to have a common theme – that of particularity, defining a physical area, conjuring specificity. They appear to contain space within a particular boundary so that it can be thought of, and properly described, as a place.
Uniqueness in location is certainly a component of place, but it’s not sufficient in itself. I’m after an understanding of the idea and experience of something as place more generally, not necessarily what makes a place.
Wikipedia digs a little deeper in describing geographic place in particular as: “an area with definite or indefinite boundaries or a portion of space which has a name in an area.” The use now of indefinite as a descriptor for place boundaries is intriguing and following the associated link, one is directed to a new page no longer on place, but on location.
While place and location are used interchangeably in geography (are they?), location is more certain, it is explained, as place “…often indicates an entity with an ambiguous boundary, relying more on human/social attributes of place identity and sense of place than on geometry.”
Not sure I subscribe wholeheartedly to that particular distinction of location and place, but it does seem that now we’re getting somewhere with the introduction of the terms place identity and sense of place. It’s in such ideas I think where there is more meaningful content to be harvested.
These terms link to additional posts that go into some detail about what sense of place might mean, particularly from the perspective of those studying such things: geographers, urban planners, landscape architects, ecological sociologists (wasn’t even aware there was such a field of study) and the like. I’m happy to see specific mention of Yi-Fu Tuan, my go-to geographer in the literature when researching my Master’s thesis those many years ago.
As promising as these definitions might be, my sense is they will never quite hit the mark precisely for me personally. Place is a powerfully personal phenomenon, so it makes sense to me that relevant definitions, if they can be properly articulated at all, are likewise going to be highly individualised.
When I have ventured into that territory in the past, I preferred to keep it simple (and draw I’m guessing from a background in mathematical logic):
place = location + meaning
Surely an oversimplification of a highly complex concept. But my experience has taught me that complex ideas are typically, in the end, best characterised by the simplest of expressions.
It was certainly the case here. After considering the idea of place for such a long time, reading much that has been written about it, listening to many who have discussed it, the most palatable definition always came back to those two components.
Location and meaning.
Location, a physical space of some kind. And meaning, an element, highly personalised, that imbued the location with something more, something significant, something that stimulated reaction, emotion, comfort, familiarity, awe…something.
That’s it really. I never saw much value in taking it further than that. There was never much return on such an investment. I was never convinced that attempts at adding more complexity to that definition amounted to anything beyond academic exercises, or even worse, creating words just because more words seemed more correct.
Place to me is inherently simple. Maybe because it is built into us at a foundational level.
I’m certainly no expert in the field, but it seems to me an awareness of place is perhaps the very first sense we develop. At birth, particularly as highly visual creatures, we immediately start to develop some sort of comprehension, in whatever way we as newborn infants do such things, of our very new surroundings. But more than that, we consider what they mean to us, why they are significant to us. It’s likely this is on a very elemental level, having to do with binary states of comfort or discomfort, but nonetheless it is a rudimentary sense of place.
And it is something that stays with us, growing more nuanced as we age and gain more knowledge and experience. It is hard-wired so to speak and whether we realise it or not, something that will influence us in profound ways throughout our lives.
This is why I am motivated to consider it, to try to understand it, if not fully, better at least.
That linkage to visual inputs is critically important I believe to place and our awareness of it. It is a starting point maybe, a trigger perhaps, a door into the realms of deeper meaning, but it is no less vital in that catalytic role.
This is one of the reasons I’ve been intrigued by the connections between photography and place. Or better, why, though never pursuing it as a profession, I’ve always been drawn to photography on a very powerful level. Few things can move me in the way some photographs can, and if I’m being truthful it is often the successful presentation of place that is the culprit.
While photographs of physical landscapes are the obvious examples, interestingly I’ve found there is no true limitation in subject matter. I enjoy the portrayal of patterns for instance, and a photograph of a pattern, natural or otherwise, 
where the source elements of that pattern are either unidentifiable or so generic as to be commonly located anywhere, can still summon place for me. For though I may not be able to precisely identify or situate it, I intrinsically understand that pattern existed at a particular location at a particular time. Or it might in fact generate a connection to a similar pattern I experienced at a wholly different time and location.
In either case the photograph is encapsulating meaning for me that has linkages to specific locations. And it achieves this by either uncovering a held sense of place or creating a new one.
And that begins to highlight the complexity of attempts to define place. For not only can it concern itself with what is right in front of you, but it can in fact weave itself into your memory and consciousness and convey meaning and conjure reaction from a distinctly different set of circumstances.
In the end it is the experience of it that matters. And there’s nothing much to gain in trying to formally define that.
Beginnings
Place is at once something intimately familiar and impossible to properly define.
It is the most universal of experiences and yet intensely personal. While it is arguably the first sense we all develop in common, the experience of it, our individual sense of it, is likewise often something we cannot satisfactorily explain, even to those closest to us.
It is just that enigmatic quality I think that has drawn me to it as an idea worth investigating, for as long as I can remember. It has been an integral part of all that I do, the way I approach life, where I’ve lived, what I have studied, with whom I have interacted, how I think – defining me if I have not been so successful at defining it. It has determined how I have earned a living for most of my life and ensured that my professional and personal lives were in many ways one in the same.
It has existed for me not so much a driving force as a leading force.
My need to explore and understand the meaning and potency of place drew me into creative expression even before it shaped the characteristics of my professional work. Two channels in particular, writing and photography, have served for me
as the best way to capture and convey my sense of place and in my estimation there are few greater joys than wandering through this world, familiar places or new, with camera in hand, taking it all in.
To convey that experience in writing is another thing altogether. I have had plenty of opportunity and even in the most structured of contexts associated with my job, that compelling mystery of place has seeped in, colouring my choice of words. Its prevalence, insistence really, led me in fact to blogging, as a format providing the opportunity for at least a modicum of the less formal prose I felt was required.
This however is my first attempt at a purely personal blog, one with no affiliation to a professional role. It’s daunting in the level of freedom it affords, but I’m prepared and comfortable to let it go where it will. As such I have no preconceived notions or prejudices about what it might contain, the style of writing, the use of imagery, the formats employed or the frequency of posts.
Nor do I have any expectations about readership. I am neither posting this exclusively for my own purposes nor publishing content expressly for an audience, but maybe instead blogging for something that represents a blend of the two.
That being said I do have ideas, plenty of them, for content. Using this as a vehicle for testing various elements of my creative writing, giving it a bit of the light of day for instance, is certainly within scope. As is posting my photography and exploring pairings with prose, as a wine well matched with a meal, on the menu of possibilities.
As I have almost always done thus far, I’ll let the unfailing draw of place set my path and my pace.
place 