northseagull-blog

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Place names #2 - Strubby

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Places project #2 - Strubby

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Over a two year period in the late 1980s, photographer Keith Carter and his wife visited 100 locations in Texas. They chose places with the most evocative or unusual names. Then they’d visit and Mr Carter would take photographs at each location. I don’t know if he had any criteria other than to photograph whatever caught his eyes when he arrived. In their many different ways, his photographs capture some essence of the places where they were taken, or of his own fleeting engagement with them.  When I first came across Mr Carter’s project, it immediately caught my attention because I share this interest in maps, landscapes, the place names that describe them, the people who live there. In the strange, half-forgotten part of England where I live, the more detailed local maps are almost a poetry of intriguing place-names: Bag Enderby, Moon Wood, Old Bolingbroke, Remarkable Oak, Strubby Airfield, Hud Holes, Skerryl’s Holt... They’ve fascinated me since we rolled up here in our van three years ago but I never thought of turning them into a photographic project. But now, thanks to Mr Carter, this is what I’m going to do. And today it started. Off we went, along tiny winding lanes, losing our way twice, U-turning, stopping to study the map again. We were looking for a place marked on the map as Deadmen’s Graves. Two neolithic long barrows, not much to see now, just tumps of trees in a wheat field and whatever lies beneath, unexcavated, a mystery biding its time

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We are taught, I suppose, to imagine our photographs big, blown up, huge images on vast white walls. Because big attracts attention, big cannot be missed. But there is another way, the photograph as object, to be held in the hand, carried in a wallet or pocket, taken out in quiet moments, studied. This way demands a different sort of attention, focused, intense, contemplative, profoundly personal.

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“Una gota de luz cae

por la grieta del cielo gris

en la primera florecilla de primavera.”

Abbas Kiarostami. Compañero del viento.

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Lomography Camera of the Day - Sprocket Rocket 

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Lomography Tag of the Day - Sinbad 

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j61nOfaduZ0)