Exercise 2.2: Explore a road

The exercise is in two parts:

1. Sequence of images
 

This part of the exercise is to make a short series of photographs about a road near me. The obvious choice for me is Craven Way, near Bristol: an unremarkable suburban road that abuts our house. I selected a 200m section of its approximately one kilometre length.

The brief is wide: 'think about something that is familiar in a different way'. I took images both of the road as a subject in its own right, and in its functional role as a conduit for private and public use and as a location for services. There are themes within the sequence, as set out below, with explanations included:

The exercise requires a digital contact sheet, something I have never heard of before. Looking the term up, turns out it is no more than a compilation of the images in one place; arguably clicking on the link to the album on Flickr suffices, but I was interested to see Photoshop performs an automated contact sheet thus:

A criticism of this approach is that the series appears rather scatter gun and non contextual and it is true that I set out with no conception of what I was trying to achieve (as per instructions), but iarguably that simply reflects what a suburban road is; Hardly an object of beauty that serves functions for the local populace; in part I have tried to make some more picturesque images; in part tried to identify the characteristics, both done using some unusual viewpoints. The road in the mist and at night emphasises the quietness of suburbia at times; the people boarding a bus is mundane but using a different perspective.

Road Movie

I watched The Road, one of the movie mentioned in the relevant section of the course guide.

This is a movie that is difficult to categorize; it is in parts horrific, spiritual, tense, and dramatic. The context - two people struggling to survive in a post apocalyptic US - is sci-fi, yet overlain with a deeply personal story of trust and bonding built between father and son, but previously lost between man and (assumed) wife. We are never told their names, nor that of the man's partner, who, in a series of flashbacks is shown to have lost the will to live, eventually succumbing to walking out on her husband and son after urging them to go south. The lakc of identity and the desaturated filming enhance the sublimeness of the scenery as man and boy head to the coast, dodging the 'bad guys' in several places. The boy needs constant reassurance that he and Papa are the 'good guys', a reassurance that is damaged near the end as Papa forces a man to strip and leaves him naked in the cold.

So what is it to do with road? In my opinion, not a lot. Roads feature principally as the backdrop - the assumed method of reaching the coast, and of providing sources of sustenance in abandoned buildings, examples below:
 

As well as providing the assumed salvation by providing the route south to the coast, the road is a place of danger as they meet scavengers in several places. Near the end, the 'good guy' whose family take in Boy after Father dies, advises Boy that if he wishes to remain then he needs to keep off the road, and its attendant dangers.  The road thus becomes a necessary evil.

In reality though, much of the movie is literally off road. Man and boy meet Eli, an old man, and they walk together for a while on what is no more than a forest track. This is rather curious as the only navigation that we know they have is a road map, far too small a scale to use for tracks, just one example of where the viewer needs to suspend belief. One scene where they discover people in a cellar occurs in a house in the middle of a forest. The road therefore becomes a bit part in a bigger personal story of survival.