searchingtoseescapelands
Posted on December 30, 2014
In order to have a feel for landscape you have to lose your feeling of place.
(J.F. Lyotard, from “Scapeland” 1989)
In his essay “Scapeland” (1989), Lyotard apprehends a sense of landscape as a kind of non-space which defies topography, history and geography. His is a bleak picture of a guarded, clandestine, unreal, uninhabitable space without destiny. For Lyotard a landscape is a violent, disruptive force; like a freeze frame of a camera it seizes time, interrupting the linear narrative and the order of place (1989: 216). It is impossible to describe with words – somehow they become cumbersome and heavy – which are powerless because the landscape has already worked on the mind, dissolving it, and has “made it vomit itself up towards the nothingness of being there” (1989: 20-21). […] I often feel that the act of taking a photograph is intrusive, almost aggressive […] The negation of place which is landscape is violent in its passivity. It is there, yet it arrests us, and denies us something at the same time.
[extract from an essay I wrote about in-between space in 2002]
© images and words Emily Hughes, 2014
In the gallery
Posted on March 4, 2013
I took a trip to the Photographer’s gallery with Alex. It was the first time I had been there since the gallery found its new home on Ramillies Street. It’s a great spot; very quiet, understated, yet just yards from the frenzied consumerism of Oxford Circus. A “behind the scenes” glimpse, if you like. I used to visit the gallery often when it was in Great Newport Street. It was a bit of a sanctuary for me when I was studying. I always enjoyed the cafe, and the bookshop, and I’m pleased to say that these are still there, and much improved. I could spend hours, literally, browsing in that bookshop, but Alex had to drag me away eventually! Five floors dedicated to photography was also a real treat.
There is an excellent exhibition: Perspectives on collage currently on. Collage is something I have been thinking about a lot recently, so it was very inspiring, and gave me much to think about.
I would thoroughly recommend a visit. It really is a fantastic space (and of course I took some pictures).
© images and content Emily Hughes and searchingtosee, 2013
The space in-between: Reflections of a passenger
Posted on May 7, 2012
Continuing on a theme, which I first blogged about here on photographing the spaces in-between; I thought I would share with you some pictures from a project I did for my MA. I am copying and pasting the pictures, and the introduction to the book as I wrote it (almost 7 years ago now!), although there is probably much I would change now.
These images are all taken on car journeys, through the windscreen or passenger window, whilst travelling on various motorways up and down the UK. They are very low quality I’m afraid as I can’t find the original disc (they were scanned from transparency film) so I took them from the book proof pdf.
The intimate is not a space but a relationship between spaces.
Beatriz Colomina
The space in-between is a space between here and there, between dreams and waking.
It is invisible; a kind of nowhere, somewhere, anywhere… a place which harbours our daydreams.
Through these narrow chinks new possibilities emerge to dazzle the eye like sunlight glimpsing through a cracked wall, and we can dream a different story, or imagine another journey which our fate does not follow for a fleeting, precious instant.
These intimate, indulgent moments in which we (if only temporarily) dwell, offer us shelter, escape, hope, despair, contentment and yearning.
These images chart a period of being a passenger; of frequent journeys I have made, places I have been transported to and daydreams I have had along-the-way.
As the window frame fills with transient scenes I freeze them in an instant, drink them up greedily, and then erase them with one click of the camera shutter. Now they are mine.
Blurred by my eye, they become something other, these non-landscapes of my journeys; not here, not there, not quite anywhere. But they are stored forever in my dreams.
The quote is from Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media by Beatriz Colomina
© Emily Hughes and searchingtosee, 2012
Capturing the spaces in-between
Posted on April 9, 2012
A photograph: a note, a thought, a flicker, a shadow, a shade, a glimpse, a glance, a moment, a blur, a trace, a shot, a capture, a fragment, an instant, an etching, a sketch, an inscription, a quotation, a resurrection, a memory…
… What is it that lies in the space in-between?
A daydream? A keepsake?
A secret time-space, revealed to the eye, captured and stored inside.
The concept in phenomenological thought of bracketing as a reductive process, allowing us to examine things up close was introduced by Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology. Seeing things in parenthesis is of course what we do when we take a photograph: our eye selects a scene, something interesting; we take the picture; the picture becomes an object in itself; we put it in an album, on the wall, on flickr, or facebook to share with friends and family. It has been divorced from its original context. It has been re-claimed and re-contextualised.
I love this picture, which I took in Berlin, of a girl reading on a step framed by a jungle of vivid green, punctuated by billowy white roses. I feel like I am peering into someone’s secret space every time I look at it. I think it makes you wonder, too who she is, why she is there and what she is reading. Does she sit there often? Is it her space? Or is she a tourist like me, who just came across a nice place to sit, like I came across a nice shot? What is her story? What was she doing just before, and just after this picture was taken? Is she happy or sad?
I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that it doesn’t really matter, because it was just a fleeting moment, in-between a zillion other moments, and I have used the capture I came across and borrowed for my own purposes, so it’s part of my story now.
© Emily Hughes and searchingtosee, 2012
searchingtosee 