Edges don’t have to be visual. Working at the edge of something could be a personal limit of some kind. For instance, I’ve been coming to Eigg, a special island in Scotland for over 15 years now, and I think I am looking for something more than what is presented to the typical visitor.
Isle of Rum, shot from Eigg, April 2022. Fuji Velvia 50, 120 roll film.
We have a relationship with the landscape. We talk to it through our camera. When we are trying out different compositions and thinking about how the landscape looks, there is really an inner dialog going on.
We also have sub-relationships with particular landscapes we’ve gotten to know.
Like all relationships, how we interact with a landscape has an ebb and a flow. I think that the more we go back and visit a friend we know, we either settle into a usual groove or pattern of discussing the same subjects, or thought patterns. This can be very similar to how we interact with a landscape we’ve gotten to know well over many visits.
As much as I feel we should never ‘strive’ or ‘push’ to improve on what we do, as any kind of force is just…. well it’s just force (an effort to go against what the universe is presenting us with), there is sometimes this need or feeling to look beyond the obvious.
To see if there is something new that you can find in an old relationship.
I would perhaps qualify what I’ve just said by saying that rather than ‘looking’, I think we should ‘feel’ or be ‘aware’ of a change within us as we find we now need different things from a familiar relationship.
Eigg is an old friend. It has taught me so much. I’ve seen it twice a year for 14 years now, and it has had so many different faces, yet because I was running a workshop, I never really had the time to make my own pictures (as this should be the case). So I have started to venture there myself this past year and plan to go back next year on my own as well. Because I ‘feel’ there is something more beyond the obvious, and because I feel there is a change within me in terms of what I think it has to offer.
So I do think working at the edge of something can be non-visual. Sometimes it’s as simple as realising there is room to find something beyond the edge of what we currently know of a place.