"The ever-present excess of seeing, knowing, and possessing in relation to any other human being is founded in the uniqueness and irreplaceability of my place in the world"---Michail Bakhtin
The imagination, according to Gaston Bachelard in "The Poetics of Space," through the power of memory, transports us in daydream to this immense elsewhere, which is where place takes us, to this "immensity within ourselves...It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone."
Engagement with place in all its vastness in Bachelard's terms, opens "interior vastness" so that the exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold.
In photography as well, you engage with intimate vastness. There is what Walter Benjamin called "the optical unconscious.
To use the dark room as dream space. Edward Weston thought photography existed in order to process the "immediate present."
Looking at photography offers a way of seeing or being in the world but not in it.
The ongoing moment of photography is best illustrated by Dorothea Lange's "The Road West, New Mexico 1938" with Robert Frank's "U.S 285 New Mexico 1955-56"
Lange's photograph tries to document a desperate search for work. In Frank, the search is not for work but for art, for images. Lange's picture is about remoteness, distance. Frank's is about covering ground.
A sense of place seems to be crucial because, although the notion of 'place' in general can be questioned or even repudiated, there will always be a place -even if only for a moment- from which we see, act and speak.
The problem is how we deal with it in terms of its representation. As soon as we try to reflect on it, contemplate upon it from an individual perspective or think of it as something shared by a community, it seems to escape from us time and again. It is this tension between being (at a certain place) and its representation that has been the topic for many writers, artists, philosophers throughout centuries and which is expressed beautifully by Maurice Blanchot in his Space of literature: "Through consciousness we escape what is present, but we are delivered to representation. Through representation we reintroduce into our intimacy with ourselves the constraints of the face-to-face encounter; we confront ourselves, even when we look despairingly outside ourselves" (p. 134).
