This week’s Lens-Artist Challenge comes from Johnbo, who challenges us to pick a word, and then select photographs that fit it. His own word – conveyance – rather than the more specific vehicle, implies that we should think a little more deeply than the first word that comes to mind, with a bit more subtlety and a bit more about the meaning. Here goes …
My word is Place. I like to go places, visiting places that have some particular (not necessarily profound) attraction. In a previous incarnation of my website, I had a portfolio called “Places” – photographs of some of the places I visited, very much like my post yesterday of Harrisville, New Hampshire. But now I have to think more deeply about Place. What makes a … well, a place … a place?
Well, a place is where something is. There’s something there. It’s a location, a set of coordinates perhaps. But location implies to locate, a verb. This suggest an intentionality. A space is not just where something is, it’s where something has been put, either physically as an act or as some notion in our mind that gives the space some meaning. It’s what converts the 3-dimensional location from a space to a place.
Here is a location in Arizona. It’s that home or ranch, nestled amid the rocks, that in my mind turns this location in the desert into a place. (I titled this image, “Homestead, NM.” It’s near the Acoma Pueblo.)
This image, titled “Westport Morning,” is from Westport, southeastern coastal Massachusetts. As above, it’s a nice image, and an appealing location. But without the house, it wouldn’t be the same place.
Yesterday’s post of Harrisville, NH, is another example. Harrisville is often named as a particuarly attractive example of the traditional New England village. Without the mill, without Harrisville Yarns, without the fact that it’s one of the earliest mills in the colonies and it’s still there, it would just be little more than a location on a map. A place is where something is; but it’s the something that’s there that gives the location its “placeness.”
Here’s something different, perhaps a bit whimsical. This image was photographed in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City. The cutout wall opening gives us a glimpse of the stairs behind with people. The opening in the wall is what gives the location its particular “placeness.” Without the cutout, it’s just a wall. In MOMA, it’s like a place within a place.
Here’s a final example, the tree on the Grand Canyon rim that I’ve shared in a post before. I think the Grand Canyon qualifies as a “place.” But the tree gives this location in the rim it’s own quality of being a place: the place where the tree grows.
Leave a ReplyCancel reply