Final Reflection
I have difficulty describing this class to my friends and family. The simplest, quickest phrase is my “photography class.” But this does not nearly describe the discussions, readings, and projects contained within the semester. When I feel like spending more time than a few seconds on the class, I would say it is class on landscape narratives and that our primary tool for investigation, interpretation, and presentation is photography. I explain how this class changed my understanding of my site.
In my first semester studio project, the Borderlands were part of my site. During our research and analysis, we spent most of our times pouring over maps, reports, historical accounts, GIS data, excel charts, and previous plans, attempting to understand a place. It was a scattershot effort. One emerged knowing a little bit of everything. We then immediately ended our analysis and started developing our interventions. Mine was a residential neighborhood that had most of the buzzwords: mixed-use, pedestrian-scaled, etc. However, what I did not have was an understanding of how all these layers wove back into the site. I tried to take a few pictures for my “existing conditions” analysis but they showed little individually, and amounted to little more as a collection. Through this class, I have began to understand how these layers of information can be matched to my personal experience in a site. By intentionally wandering through my site with the camera, I was able to concentrate on what was in front of me, what existed, and how I could use photography to say something larger about the site itself.
The reading by Galen Rowell was a big moment for me. His ruminations on the role of light stunned me and made me rethink how I relate to my environment. When I read that nothing would have color or shape without light, I learned nothing I had not previously known, but reading it in conjunction with Rowell’s photography made me understand on a deeper level. It made me rethink how I took pictures. It made me rethink how I thought of material and form. It made me rethink how humans receive information, make spatial connections and relationships, and elevate those into meaning. The revelation—that light has meaning—followed me throughout the course and caused me to think about other senses, especially sound.
Though I learned much from our conversations with Anne and each other, I learned the most from looking. Whether the projected pictures were excellent or nothing particularly special (and we all had both kinds), I learned most about the relationship between distillation and complexity. We talked so much about what made a picture a photograph versus a “postcard image.” Though we never arrived at an explicit answer (and I wonder if there is one), I am more acutely aware of which pictures I take are really special. Though I was initially frustrated by Joel Meyerowitz’s vague, nebulous description of how he photographs, I think I now understand why he spoke the way he did. It is trained knowledge through exploration and experience, not a list of rules, that make an excellent photographer.
Journal for Monday 11_16
I spent a good amount of time debating what format my final essay would take. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I enjoy using sound, music, and lyrics to explore Joel Sternfeld’s photos. I decided, with some encouragement from Anne, to attempt to capture a piece of the borderland, to lay bare some of the underlying emotions I have experienced there. After making this decision, I felt burdened with the need to explain every detail of the site in song and sound. I decided to start by writing down a series of words or phrases I associated with the site. Here is my stream of thought “word dump.”
severed. time. passing. covering. revealing. forgetting. blocking. reclaiming. revise. reation entropy. weathering. rebuild. restore. play. trashed. broken. shattered. filled. left. leaving. returning. fencing out. hostility. movement. storage. waiting room. metal glass. asphalt. rust. salt. encroach. overshadow. overgrowth. forget. exposed. waves colliding. trucks moving. rumble. whir. crackle and buzz. you are not welcome. urbs. wire. crater. razors and barbs. plastic. wind. stripped. towers. collapse. build. paradox. collision. burial. remission.
I had already written an ambient piece full of delay, feedback and drawn out chords. I spent some time deciding who the voice of the singer would represent. Looking over my journals, I realized that I often felt there were two voices in this landscape: industry and residential, old and new, large and small. These often competing voices create a landscape cacophony in the borderlands, a melange of confused narrative. If there was one central theme that joined these paradoxical relationships, it was time. How to represent this? I decided to write a duet between these twin forces which ends in a unison verse about time’s effect on the landscape. I am continuing to struggle with what these voices are. Initially, I wrote them as the voice of industry and the voice of the people, but I’m afraid that might be too literal and specific. I’m in the process of making the voice more about paradox than any single individual. More about dueling words and images, than industry versus residential.
The difficulty is matching these up to my pictures in a way that isn’t literal or simplistic, but still is emotionally complex…
Journal for 11_4
As I walked my site this weekend taking photos, I found myself struggling with my approach. Should I focus on the assignment and search out particular categories of landscape grammar? Or should I move through my site taking pictures of what gives me that intangible but telling “feeling?” As I read through Spirn’s list of landscape grammar elements, I realized that many of them seemed to rely on intentionality by a designer. Many of the examples that jumped out at me were from designed landscapes and even the vernacular examples seemed difficult to apply to my site. “The Borderland” is marked more by the absence of the design than its presence.
However, I realized that the intention can come from the photographer as much as it can from a designer. The photographer, through their lens, suggests relationships, guides the eye to consider elements it might miss. For example, I came upon a piece of a tree branch that had grown through the fence of a truck lot. It was severed on both ends, impaled on the chain link. It is my job as the photographer to observe such anomalies. By framing it between the trucks, it speaks of a industrial site divorced and at odds with a natural past. I was asked by an employee at the lot what the fuck I was doing. I told him I was photographing for a class and he just smiled, shook his head, and walked away. Would he have the same reaction if he saw the picture? If it was elevated beyond daily experience? This is what I try to do when photographing: elevating the overlooked.
Journal for 10_28: Joel Sternfeld
“Near Vail, Colorado, October 1980″
My first encounter with a Joel Sternfeld photo was at the Art Institute of Chicago in spring of 2007. A good friend of mine was interning in the photography department and had the wonderful opportunity to curate an exhibit on early color photography. She walked me around the exhibit explaining who the photographers were, why they were important, and why she grouped them in a certain way. Eventually we came to a photo of golden yellow trees fill the top half of the image and tower over a ravine full of wrecked cars, their rusted bodies almost lost in the shadows. This image struck me like few had before. It effectively used the grammatical device of anachorism or the placing of an object where it does not belong. I immediately started asking why those cars were there. Who had put them there? Who had owned them before? What would become of them?
I turned to my friend and said, “This guy takes pictures the way that I want to write songs.” At the time I was completing work on my first album of original songs. Many of my songs were narrative in nature, having grown up in a country music tradition, and I constantly struggled with including just enough but not too much information. This picture suggested without telling. It allowed the viewer to enter in, explore, and take ownership of the questions posed. I immediately found a used copy of American Prospects and decided to, as an experiment, write a song in response to this image. The result is a song entitled, “Yellow Tree,” which suggests that the cars were left in the ravine by a figure who enjoys stealing cars for its own sake. This was a difficult writing process for me. I struggled to avoid mere description. I would never pretend to know what Sternfeld was saying. Instead, I wanted to treat his photos like the stage sets they appeared to be. In my mind, my character inhabited this image.
You can hear the song, “Yellow Tree,” on my myspace page: www.myspace.com/sawgrassmusic
I have continued, on and off, to return to this set of photos. I have written about four songs over the last two years from them. Whenever I get stuck with writing about my own life or experiences, I enjoy turning to this book and wrestling with the images to conjure fiction from them. Sternfeld has a knack for capturing the strangeness of America. He frames surreal juxtapositions that exist in the seemingly infinite landscape of opportunity. His photos are quirky, disturbing, joyful, and melancholic. Most of all, they are complex. After these last few years of living in a contentious dialog with this book of photos, I still wish to write songs like Sternfeld takes pictures. I’m still learning what that might mean.
Journal for 10_28: Eudora Welty
In Eudora Welty’s short story, “Livvie,” a young woman who has long been kept captive by her significantly older husband breaks free of her prison. Welty uses visual language effectively. Her descriptions of the house and its interior are static, still, and stale. All seems to have a layer of fine dust.
The front room was papered in holly paper, with green palmettos from the swamp spaced at careful intervals over
the walls. There was fresh newspaper cut with fancy borders on the mantel-shelf, on which were propped photographs of old or very young men printed in faint yellow-Soloman’s people. Solomon had a houseful of furniture. There was a double settee, a tall scrolled rocker and an organ in the front room, all around a three-legged table with a pink marble top, on which was set a lamp with three gold feet, besides a jelly glass with pretty hen feathers in it. Behind the front room, the other room had the bright iron bed with the polished knobs like a throne, in which Solomon slept all day. There were snow-white curtains of wiry lace at the window, and a lace bed-spread belonged on the bed.
Welty writes as if one was looking over a photograph, meticulously studying each detail moving from one object to the next. Compare this style of description to Livvie’s perception of nearby workers in the field.
She could see how over each ribbon of field were moving men and girls, on foot and mounted on mules, with hats set on their heads and bright with tall hoes and forks as if they carried streamers on them and were going to some place on a journey-and how as if at a signal now and then they would all start at once shouting, hollering, cajoling, calling and answering back, running, being leaped on and breaking away, flinging to earth with a shout and lying motionless in the trance of twelve o’clock.
Welty’s description of the outside is raucous and joyful. Verbs pile end-over-end in her sentences. If this was a photograph, it would be one which is blurred from motion, packed with objects, and overflowing with color.
Another visual device itself, the bottle tree is used as a metaphor for Solomon’s overprotective ways. It is, on its face, a way to trap evil spirits, but in the story it stands more for Livvies imprisonment than it does for her protection.
Much of this story could be communicated through a photographic essay, much like we will attempt to create about our site, because so much is tied to visual interactions and metaphor. The scene that came the clearest to my mind was when Cash and Livvie were standing over Solomon in his dying moments. When Solomon awakes from his slumber, Cash steps back and cocks his fist, ready to punch the old man if he tries to grab Livvie. Time seems to stand still, each character watching the other, waiting. This composition alone would tell a lot about the narrative and the relationship between the characters.
Journal for 10_28: Landscape Grammar
Can grammatical terms–metonomy, metaphor, conceit, etc.–be used to describe landscape in a way that helps us understand how and why it impacts us? We were asked to think about some of the terms Spirn explores in her book, The Language of Landscape, and think about how six of them might apply to our own site.
Aposiopesis – “a statement or address is broken off, to be completed in the imagination”. My site is a place where some structures and objects are destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again, while others remain strangely preserved. Many times, changes to a structure leave remnants, clues to what was once there. For example, one might look at a building and see a patch of new brick amongst older brick. This might lead you to find the building’s use changed and the new owner decided windows were unnecessary so he or she bricked them up. Another example from my site is this fragment of fence. It hints at what was once there, lending mystery–perhaps even sadness–to the area.
Anachronism – “taking something out of time or place” Time itself is a very important part of my site. Maybe not as much time on the day-to-day level, but time over years. The way history has shaped the strange layering of my site is noticeable even if not fully understood. One sometimes sees a designer trying to reach back to a past to establish a sense of legitimacy, power, or familiarity. The Harborwalk extension, for example, features picturesque lamposts which are quite out of sync with the ultra-efficient and modern forms of the power substation directly behind the Harborwalk.
Alliteration – “the repetition of a certain form or shape” Many forms in my site are determined not out of consideration for originality or aesthetics, but instead result out of pure function. These elements are often repeated within and across my site. Often this alliterative quality elevates a common object to a surreal one. For example, there are many storage lots on my site. Where one would not pay much attention to an individual cherrypicker, seeing a cluster of dozens causes one to pause and consider.
Exaggeration – Making an object bigger for effect. The application of this grammatical term to landscape is, like others, tricky because we associate grammar with intention. Applying intention to landscape can be difficult because sometimes the original designers or makers did not intend anything other than to achieve their goals within a specific context. Only afterwards do students of landscape like ourselves come back and interpret what they have done in a certain way. For example, consider the power plant in my site that looms over the nearby houses. Each successive addition multiplies in size and ugliness. It dwarfs the neighboring buildings.
Placement – to set something in a way that establishes a relationship. The power plant example is quite relevant in this example as well. Exaggeration only works in its context. If everything is exaggerated, nothing is. If the power plant were not so close to the houses in my site, its scale would not seem so intrusive and foreboding.
Framing - “Framing brackets; it separates from context, focuses attention by screening undesired or irrelevant views, by directing the gaze.”Framing on my site is most often seen in the many fences that proliferate the area. Placed to obscure, the different types of fences say different things about the contents held within and the owners’ attitudes towards those on the outside.
Though these six element (and more) can be found on my site, it is up to me, the photographer, to select, frame, capture, and convey them to others. My construction of a shot can emphasize or obscure the presence of these grammatical elements. Surely landscape has an experiential grammar, but photography can twist and interpret it.
Journal for 10_21
I have been on site more than usual over the last week because our photo assignment is due this coming week. This is why, while reading our assigned text today, I was constantly making mental comparisons between the sites she describes and the Borderland. I was particularly drawn to the passage that discusses how landscape grammar–the underlying patterns and structure that create meaningful and functional landscapes–can either be respected or ignored. Just like grammer in communication, one ignores the grammar of landscape at his or her own peril. Miscommunication is the best of circumstances when one ignores these underlying structures. Spirn cites a case in which developers and city officials set a stream down into a tunnel beneath a neighborhood, with cascading consequences for those houses built in the floodplains. I immediately started to think about how water works on my site.
Being on the harbor, it was not too long ago that my site bordered one of the most polluted bays in the nation. After the creation of the MWRA, deer island, and some serious sanitary engineering work, this problem has been largely ameliorated. Part of the issue were the CSOs (combined sewer overflows) that combined sewage and storm water flows together, and would divulge them together into outlets when rain threatened to overwhelm the system. My mind wandered to the Reserved Channel, an inlet of water that penetrates my site. Along the south edge of it is an isolated section of the Harborwalk, created because of Chapter 91 of Massachussetts law which allows the city and state to demand public uses from any private development within a particular buffer zone of the waterfront. So now a nicely kept section of wooden boardwalk, benches, railings, interpretive signage, and viewing stations sits in this mostly industrial area. It’s context, however, cannot be ignored. It wraps around a substation, for example, with large double fences, cyclone razor wire, and a deep, threatening electric pulse. On the other side is a ditch running out into the Reserved channel. I have only been during low tide, but at this point the ditch is nearly empty. Traffic cones, soda bottles, and jagged piers punctuate the rivulets and puddles leaking out into the channel. This is a CSO. A large pipe sits dormant waiting to vomit any excess into the ditch.
These are reminders of processes that cannot be ignored, but we do anyway. This whole area is the result of man reaching past the natural carrying capacity of land. It was marshy tideland before it was filled. A grid was imposed. Infrastructure was brought in so we could further economy. I can’t hate it. I am a part of it. I am a participant. But I want to understand it. Though the engineering triumphs of humans, such as filling in all this land and making it ‘productive’ are worthy of appreciation, they are not immune to nature’s process. Entropy is a strong process and its signs are everywhere. A collapsed shed. Rust creeping across a chain-link fence. Sprouting weeds in a vacant lot. These places only exist because we constantly repair and rebuild them. The more we ignore the underlying grammar of the landscape, the more work we must put in to rebuilding and shoring them up against the irresistible pull towards disorder. But what else would we do if not for this constant work? Could we live another way? Sometimes I’m not so sure.
A side note. While photographing the aforementioned ditch, I was struck by how easily photography can gloss over certain traits of an object and imbue it with others. Take this photo. At dawn, a polluted ditch turns into a trickle of light, leading towards the reflection of the buildings across the channel. Does a photo like this tell some sort of truth? Or does it disguise it? What is my moral obligation when I try to communicate the site? This is something that has puzzled me repeatedly as I have sorted through images for our “Significant Detail” set (which you can see on my Flickr now).
Journal for 10_12: Understanding Place
For our first photography assignment, we were asked to photograph light—how it interacts, scatters, reveals, disguises—on our site. I remember thinking, as I took the photos, “How do any of these pictures communicate the nature of this area?” This question has only grown larger as we move onto our next assignment entitled “Significant Detail.” We are to photograph “traces,” signs of greater processes or narratives that give a deeper understanding of our site. Luckily, our class discussions and readings attempt to give us greater insight into understanding and communicating through photography.
Spirn’s Landscape of Langauge discusses context and the various forms it takes. How context gives things meaning either by shaping them and thereby creating them on site as in a sand dune shaped by the contextual winds. Sometimes it’s the lack of context that gives an object meaning. Spirn gives the example of the great rocks of Stonehenge. Their sheer size and mass meant little until they were dragged all the way out to the their present location. Because they were ripped from their context, they symbolize power and strength to those who know how to read the objects. This last point is an especially important one; context is only understood and interpreted in the individual. If a person encounters the stones without knowing anything about history or geology, for example, they would interpret them differently or merely wonder at their strangeness. Context is partly that set of experiences and knowledge that each one of us accrues over our lifetime.
Seamus Haeaney expresses this understanding of context when he writes,
“It is this feeling, assenting, equable marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind, whether that country of the mind takes its tone unconsciously from a shared oral inherited culture, or from a consciously savoured literary culture, or from both, it is this marriage that constitutes the sense of place in its richest possible manifestation.”
Without prior knowledge, cultural mythology, or at least tools for understanding process, material, and form in a place, it can only be appreciated on a relatively shallow level. To experience a place in this way is to be like the tourist who wanders through a historical place snapping pictures of every pretty thing they see, all the while not knowing the how, the why, the when. Certainly not unpleasant, and sometimes unavoidable, but not the charge we are given with our own sites. Though Heaney mainly concerns himself with how the voice of poets reflect their particular place of origin, he concludes by saying why they were different from just another person living in that place. None of these poets surrenders himself to the mythology of his place but instead each subdues the place to become an element in his own private mythology. Perhaps this is the true call: To subdue the place into our own mythology. Only then will we be able to communicate the emotion of a site.
Joel Meyorwitz, in an interview, seems to reject all this forethought of meaning, all this agonizing over what is in front of the camera lens, “I’m visceral. I just go, and if I see something I don’t ask what it means.” He goes on to talk vaguely about being in “the zone” and “feeling right” about certain places as opposed to others. Personally, I find this talk frustrating because it makes me feel as if he has instincts that I do not. Perhaps these could be sharpened by anyone after years of committed photographic work, but I’ve been point-and-clicking casually and intermittently for only a few years. I do, however, understand that not all communication with one’s surroundings is purely logical and it is important to allow for chance, to be open to opportunity.
These three readings all point to an understanding of place that starts within the individual. Burdened or blessed with external cues, larger cultural myths, knowledge of process, form, or material, experience, or even effervescent feelings, we often arrive at a place with both too much and too little to truly see deeper meaning. Previous prejudices have the potential to blind us to subtle beauties of a place; ignorance causes us to miss subtle signals to larger narratives. Only through close observation and study could we possibly approach a sense of place.
Journal Entry for 10_5
In Spirn’s “The Language of Landscape,” she digs into the ways that deeper processes–whether natural like rain and wind or sociological in the case of religion or community decision making–can shape and influence landscape. The products of these processes, such as a sandstone arch or the state of a community garden, can be appreciated on their face, but to really understand their logic, one must delve into the deeper processes. This is not an entirely easy thing to do. Some places, such as deserts, Spirn writes, have easily discernible interactions with processes. One sees the dunes created by the wind quite plainly. However, when one turns to a landscape such as the Borderlands, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to tease out every process and the interactions between them that have led to such a place.
For this journal, we have been asked to think about what the most important processes of our site may be. An underlying reason that any of this area exists is the industry and the workers brought to the seaport on the South Boston Waterfront. Boston has a strong history of landfill. I was shocked the first time I saw a map from the late 1700s of the town’s shoreline. South Boston existed long before the area to the north, known now as the South Boston Waterfront, was created. Around the beginning of the 20th century, the Boston Wharf Company started to shore up and build out the tidal marsh to the north of South Boston, creating an industrial area full of railroad tracks, wharfs, storage facilities, and manufacturing industry. Large lots existed because of the large spatial demands of these facilities. Just to the south, the neighborhood of South Boston profited from the many jobs available. An uneasy relationship between the two existed, a clear delineation kept of what was residential and what was industrial. Today the legacy of these processes of landfill and the rise and fall of the shipping and manufacturing industry can be seen in the Borderlands. Large lots previously occupied by warehouses are now filled by megastructures such as the convention center or large paved parking lots. The Borderlands itself carries the residential parcel structure of small lots but the use of its neighborhood to the north. Small businesses, auto shops, a FedEx center, wholesalers, an abandoned power plant, and most of all, sites for storage of many things from cherry-pickers to granite slabs to delivery trucks occupy these sites. The proximity to the big dig is beneficial for these sites for whom the shipping conduit of I-93 is a crucial connection to the greater Boston region.
I feel that often, in the urban landscape, most natural processes are entropic: fires burn down, winds blow over, floods and waves eat away at foundations and crack the roots of buildings. Human processes, such as the landfill operations that created the land underneath my site, attempt to restore order against these natural processes. Does it have to be like this? A conflict, a struggle? But I digress…
Spirn discusses the reading of form as a way to understand the history, present, and possible futures of a site. In my site, a hodgepodge of forms exist if one looks at each building by itself. However, this hodgepodge begins to make sense when one zooms out. The mix of small warehouses, substations, power plant, bars, diners, can be read as the crashing together of two waves of form: the small houses and parcels coming from the south and the industrial districts of the north colliding and scattering. One can also think of the strange nature of the district as a place that has seen several revisions, some buildings escaping the wrecking ball, while others are obliterated only to be replaced to meet the needs of the current society.
Perhaps, this is a place for things that South Boston needs, but does not want in its neighborhood.
Though the area is a hodgepodge of form, it is united by the repetition of certain elements. Fences are found in many places, partially obscuring what lies behind. Rows of cars parked along the streets, creates a rhythm lacking in the buildings themselves.
As I progress to our next photography assignment, I hope to pull out the “significant details” of the Borderlands. What individual elements and relationships can I capture that tell something about the history, present, or make predictions of the future?
The Borderlands: A quick introduction.
I suppose the first post of this blog should explain the project for my class, Sensing Place. Our primary charge is to understand landscape–this includes both natural and built forms–through the medium of photography. My site, entitled “The Borderlands: Between Southie and the Seaport,” was chosen because of its strange “inbetweeness.” It is a strip of mixed light industrial separating the fine grain townhouses and triple-deckers of South Boston from the sprawling, blown-out, monumental convention center, its parking lots, and the massive infrastructural scars of the Big Dig. I became fascinated with this area because it seemed to lack the control of other areas. It was messy, full of cluttered storage piles, artist loft conversions, all partially obscured by ever-present chain link fence. When we were given a choice of sites, I thought of many interesting places, but none with the unique emotional impact this place contained. I hope to drill down into the qualities of this site that make it feel like a theater set, like a place waiting for something–anything–to happen.
The general extents of my site for the course.
