For the last year or so, I’ve been exploring the idea that how we experience places—directly or via photographs—is affected by the names by which we know them.
While reading Liz Wells’ excellent book, Land matters: landscape photography, culture and identity, I was struck by this paragraph:
“The act of naming is an act of taming. In Western culture, describing space as desert, or wilderness, or planet, represents potential comprehensibility and cues scientific and philosophical enquiry. By naming I mean both the terming of a space as, for example, wilderness, and the naming of such space, for example, Antarctica. Naming turns space into place.”
This suggests that an ‘empty’ piece of land takes on a new status once we attach a label to it. With the history of colonization in what is now called Canada, we can push this further: re-naming a place erases a previous reality and creates a new identity for it, ignoring whatever peoples might already have been present. In a real sense, the land has been re-placed.
Airports, parking lots, gas stations, waiting rooms, fast food outlets, hotels…
French anthropologist Michel Augé calls these ‘non-places.’ They are built for transactions, for commerce and for efficiency. Devoid of identity, they tend to flatten the identity of the people who are in them: you are not a person with all your unique experiences, qualities and characteristics. Instead, you are a customer, a client, a traveller, a citizen. You will almost certainly have a number assigned to you, and it may be more important than the name you had when you came in. You might also have to present some form of identification to enter, use or leave the place, and it may contain a photograph of you. But it will never be a portrait.
Being in a non-place can make you a non-person. There’s an upside: you can go anywhere in the world and know without asking how the local non-places work—because they all work in exactly the same way. The downside is that, because they are all the same, anything particular, anything unique, anything indigenous is suppressed. There is no local colour, aroma or flavour. We are learning to care more about diversity in our natural environment, but we don’t seem worried about the diversity of our built environments.
And it’s risky. Because first "we shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us."
This is a personal journey through my childhood by revisiting every house I lived in with my parents. I draw on appropriated imagery from Google Street View because the first three houses are more than 5,000km from where I currently live and even the closest are still 500km away.
The texts contain some of my strongest memories at each house. These are unique to me, but every one of us will have a similar mental catalogue of places and associated memories. And all of these are increasingly recalled through images that may or may not be ours, and may or may not be real.
