Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity by Liz Wells: Chapter 6 Sense of Location

"Photographs also contribute to perpetuating myths and memories associated with place." (loc 4212)

 "Photography cannot replicate actual experience....but can reference, or substitute, through invoking equivalent memories." (loc 4212).

• Landscape contribute to our sense of identity, probably more in the sense of continuity of patterns;
• 'seesaw'  between topographic (or observational) photography at one end and composited imagery that explicitly draws on personal experience at the other.(loc 4240)
• Photography as a tool to assist social sciences: landscape focusses attention on visual and social aspeacts of human occupance;
• Despite the pretence of recording what is found "selection implicates subjective interests and aesthetic pre-dispositions." (loc 4297);
•  New Topographics as anti-photography - a lack of emotional engagement with land and environment, NT as outside the concepts of beauty on the one hand, and of aesthetics on the other;
•  Mellor (1997) Island Sea Front 1989-94 used OS maps to to plan a trip around Britain - outward photographs taken every 50 kilometres. This enforces a structure not merely on the journey but also on the photography
• Journey (loc 4537) - discusses walking "the pace is slower, and the experience of environment is more immediate....[It] is corporeal; the process integrates the sensual and the cerebral.....A tapestry of reflections accumulates along the way." Fulton and Long's work;
• "A WALK HAS A LIFE OF ITS OWN AND DOES NOT NEED TO BE MATERIALISED INTO AN ARTWORK".(www.hamish-fulton.com); "AN ARTWORK MAY BE PURCHASED BUT A WALK CANNOT BE SOLD".
•  For the walker, photographs and diaries act as memory aides, helping to conserve the precision of particualr moments of observation for later contemplation. They record something of that which was experienced. The walk is a fact; a plan realised through time from starting point to outcome...By contrast with the topographic, such imagery is not about place itslef so much as the experience of place."
• Photography and memeory - may be a substitute for memory - allow later contemplation, may adduce responses beyond sight - e.g. sound of birds, smell of slat feel the sand (loc 4643(;
• Proust - photographs 'reconfigure memory ;
• "Land matters. It matters across a range of interests and concerns, from the political and socio-economic through the ecological to subjective associations and collective identity". (loc 4794)