Peregrinations

The image that was last posted on the blog - a white flag fluttering in an energetic Icelandic breeze - followed by a four month silence may have suggested that I moved on to other horizons. Well, not quite. But admittedly it has been very quiet. My creative energy was to a large extent focused on the studies I have started on urbanism. Easter was spent on an urban design studio in Venice, followed by two intense months of writing papers and preparing for exams. That brought us to the beginning of July. Wrapping up project work for the holidays from which we have returned just two weeks ago. There you have four months.

But it's certainly true that my drive to go out and take pictures has waned over the last couple of months. I've grown used to the cyclical rise and fall of creative energy. Or rather: to the modulations between different carriers of energy, be it words, music, images or ideas. And so recently I have been more into reading, writing and also exploring new musical repertoire. As a result, images receded a little in the background.

The holidays were a good opportunity to reconnect with my photographic endeavours. I had planned a week at the foot of the Matterhorn, to proceed with my 'portrait' project. And so I packed up my 4x5" camera and headed for Zermatt and Cervinia, rediscovering the joy of the slow peregrinations around this fabulous mountain. Despite some persistent cloud formations around the Cervino, I was able to take some good pictures. This time I focused on the well known and often photographed east and south sides of the mountain. That resulted in some good images. Very classic, but with a poise and quiet that suits me very well. I am starting to build up a significant portfolio now of Matterhorn pictures, but the final shape of the project is still unclear. However, I managed to secure the support of a number of key people in the Cervinia community, which will make it more easy, I hope, to find a place for the project when the commemoration is due, in 2015.

After the Matterhorn I caught up with the family for a week of walking in a quiet corner of the French Alps. I exchanged the 4x5" for the XPan loaded with Reala, to take some snaps along the way. After this relaxing week we headed to the Southwest of France for a week of rest and reading.

The other project that continues to loom large on my photographic horizon is the Hölderlin project. My studies in landscape urbanism and landscape architecture have led me onwards in the conceptualization of this project:an amalgamation of philosophical reflection, textual analysis, bodily movement, travelling, craftsmanship, photography, and engineering and design of physical infrastructure and landscape. The plan is now to use the thesis on landscape urbanism that I will write the coming academic year to document these ideas and to do a first survey of their interconnection. That work could be the basis for a much more encompassing research (including an 800km long walk) that could eventually result in a PhD. It is a fascinating project, linking our current predicament (environmental pressure, sprawling cities, large inequities, robber baron capitalism) to the basic datum of the landscape and our relationship to it, with an early Romantic German poet as mediator.

One implication of my studies is that I am starting to look in a different way at the world around us. Previously, quite a bit of my photographic work was centered on the urban environment. But I find it difficult now to find an appropriate stance that does justice at once to my increased conceptual knowledge about cities and the more intuitive response I have towards the city (which, in the light of this new knowledge, I tend to see as naive). It will take time to sort this out.