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 I’m guessing that every one of us has a similar mental catalogue of places and associated memories.
I view street photography more and more as spectacle or theatre: an endless parade of performers who walk on and off a set that I help to define.
I don’t claim to have invented night pictures of gas stations or a taxonomy of industrial and commercial structures (the Bechers did that in the last century). But I see more and more of my photography as theatre. The background is a ‘set’ and sometimes the right ‘actors’ hit their mark in front of it.
Gas stations are lit artificially like stages for a spectacle but there are few people present and sometimes none at all. Something momentous is about to happen—exchanging a few dollars for fuel pumped out of a tank below your feet never looked so important.
The gas station is a place full of energy.
Black and white photography used to be the norm because… well, because there wasn’t anything else. Now, black and white is a conscious choice. And for a place like New York City, sometimes it’s a choice that fits.
