Coastal Walk

This afternoon I wanted to start photographing my local area and coast line. The theory I am using for my Dissertation and major Project is the "Poetics of Space" by Gaston Bachelard. He uses wonderful, descriptive and poetic words to describe our relationship with Space.

At the beginning of Chapter 8 Infinite Immensity There is a quote by R. M. Rilke The World is large, but in us it is deep as the sea .... and another is by Jules Valles Space has always reduced me to silence.

I walked along the Coast Road Path to St Ishmael's Church. Fortunately there were two women cleaning the church after the  recent Harvest Festival Service and asked if I would like to go into the Church. This I did. I shot some images with my camera and a couple with my Mobile.

Mobile image

I had taken my Medium Format Camera with me to shoot images of the landscape and sea life, but an opportunity to take some shots of the Church was welcome.

I crossed the Railway Track, always a slightly unnerving experience listening as hard as I could to make sure there wasn't a train coming. I sat for a while admiring the views before setting off to walk slowly home along the beach searching intuitively to compose a good image. I wont know if I have succeeded until I have developed the films.

What struck me while I was photographing the magnificent space, was that the mood I was creating was that of solitude. Looking in the view finder, I saw that solitude. It is the freedom of the space that draws me to it, but when I am there it is the solitude that strikes me.

This solitude is not loneliness. Quite the contrary. I feel no sense of loneliness as I walk, but a sense of being together with all that surrounds me. The energy I feel is comforting and safe. I sense the great wonder of all nature that surrounds me and it is this that fills my solitude.

Bachelard writes of Baudelaire using the word "Vast" ... he writes " It is no exaggeration to say that for Baudelaire, the word vast is a metaphysical argument by means of which the vast world and vast thoughts are united. But actually this grandeur is most active in the realm of intimate space. For this grandeur does not come from the spectacle witnessed, but from the unfathomable depths of vast thoughts. 

In his Journauz intimes Baudelaire writes
 "In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which become the symbol of it." The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold. (Bachelard. G. 1994. Beacon Press Boston) (Bachelard. G: 192)

The freedom that I sense in the landscape enables my mind to free itself from all thoughts, to contemplate the land itself with the intention of photographing intuitively how I feel, as opposed to photographing the details of the scene before me.