A Place is Not One Place

Review: OCA/RPS Investigating Place with Psychogeography

Walking in the landscape and taking photos has always seemed a natural

combination to me, but last year I kept leaving my camera at home because 'I've

already photographed that' (though it didn't seem to matter that I'd 'already walked

there'). Needing a boost, I decided to sign up for the 10-week OCA/RPS online

course Investigating Place with Psychogeography.

From the introductory reading list, it seemed, to me at least, to be quite hard to pin

down what exactly psychogeography was and how to do it. Essentially. geography

+ psychology - psychogeography - studying the effect of geographical environment

on human emotions and behaviour.

A key strategy of psychogeography is the “derive" or the "drift": walking while using

de-familiarising and disorientating tactics to experience terrain with fresh eyes. For

instance, you might decide always to take a left turn at a fork, or draw a curve on a

street map that you then try to follow, or use a map of one place to try to navigate

another.

The first exercise on the course is, naturally, a dérive. I decided to visit a village

just three miles from home that I only ever drive through. I "drifted" up and down

the suburban streets and found plenty to photograph: every garden and doorway

presented a still life, a statement of individuality.

My second dérive took me to Matlock Bath, with its peculiar mix of Georgian

architecture, amusement arcades and stunning limestone rockfaces. It's a place I

thought I knew well, but a steep footpath took me to new, high landscape

viewpoints before dropping down to the familiar river path. I was taking

photographs and feeling exhilarated.

I visited Iona during the course and, in the spirit of the dérive, randomly turned left from the ferry terminal. The coast path soon petered out and I ended up going round in circles on a bleak, boggy moor in sideways Scottish rain. When I

eventually arrived at Iona Abbey (the reason most people make the "pilgrimage"here), the staff were locking up. I suppose it was a "different experience. especially considering that it was the bold colours of light-filled Scottish Colourist paintings that had lured me here.

The psychogeography course encourages you to connect, explore and experiment far beyond documenting a place through photography.

Writing, poetry, drawing, mapping from memory, thinking about what a map cannot convey - all those sensory elements are a part of it. In fact, midway through the course, I experienced methodology overload! It was then that my tutor offered a really helpful take on psychogeography: it was a way of engaging deeply with

place to generate creative outputs.

In addition to this, a colleague lent me Sonia Overall's Heavy Time: A

Psychogeographer's Pilgrimage, which was the most relatable book I read on

"how to do" psychogeography. She emphasised "going with the flow" and "tuning

in"; she collected talismans; she experienced "thin places" where reverberations

from the past were felt in the present.

All this came together in my final project, which focused on Cales Dale in

Derbyshire's White Peak. To me, it has always felt like a special place.

I already knew that prehistoric people had lived and worked there, sheltered by the

limestone. But I had not realised there was an extensive cave system beneath the

dale until my research brought up a video of someone enthusiastically making

their way through the dark and the mud. I was conscious now of layers through

time, through rock, of portals into other worlds.

The impact of ash dieback was horribly apparent. There were so many fallen

trees. Nearby were extensive programmes of felling and the beginnings of mixed-

species replanting. I was witnessing a transformation.

The photographs I took were landscapes, inevitably, but I layered some of them. A

“talisman”, a small piece of limestone from the dale, became a key component of

still-life experiments back at home. A white background created a clinical look. I

returned to the subject the following week using a black backdrop. This time I

wanted to evoke 17th-century Dutch still life: "memento mori". When the backdrop

began to smoulder, (an unexpected shaft of sun hit the mirror I was using), I kept

shooting.

The next issue was how to bring a range of experiments together into a final

project.

I returned to Cales Dale. It was a misty day; I was alone and feeling apprehensive.

I had brought along some prints of my photographs, thinking I might stick them to

the limestone "walls", but it was too steep and slippery to work near the rockface. I

sat down perplexed. Then I noticed the dry cow parsley stalks. I tried attaching my

prints to them with sellotape; one photo (of ash seed, appropriately) fell into the

undergrowth, but the others stayed stuck and wafted gently. It felt an uplifting kind

of conclusion: to hold a very small exhibition of my photographs “en plein air" with

the dale as subject, backdrop and the only audience.

When I downloaded my photographs at home, my views down into the dale had

strange little dark blots in places, perhaps they were dust or droplets of moisture?

Or perhaps a manifestation of ash dieback? It summed up the strangeness of the

day.

I finished the course with a whole list of project ideas, and I definitely take my

camera out on walks again. I found focusing on one place while being encouraged

to experiment with method and material a really powerful process. My experience

with psychogeography has shown me how to look deeper, look differently.