|
 For quite a few years I've followed the work of Eric Perlberg over at Curiously Incongruous, a site that has just passed its fifth anniversary. I think it was the name of his blog that attracted me to it originally, but I discovered that it contained photographic explorations with which I could really identify.
I visit it periodically, usually waiting a week or two between trips so that there are a number of new images to be viewed in series. For this is not a one-shot-a-day blog, nor is it about presenting single images for their own sake - although many could stand alone. In Eric's own words:
"Over the past several years I've walked thousands of kilometres through the streets of every part of London photographing what I thought might make interesting photographs."
I am not a regular visitor to London and its environs, but on the occasions when I do get down there I take great delight in just wandering through the lesser-known parts if I have the time. When my daughter moved to a flat in South London some years ago, I remember sending an e-mail to Eric complementing him on a series made in her locality. Although I didn't take photographs around there myself, I felt that his perfectly echoed my experience of the area (Camberwell/Packham).
 If I'd had to give a name to his style and approach I'd have found it difficult; urban landscapes yes, but somehow not of the 'traditional' kind. So it was with some excitement that I discovered today that he now has another site which gives it all a name and a context - Dérive.
It wasn't a term I'd ever come across and so - guided by his brief introduction and references - I set out to discover more.
I was familiar with the regular column in The Independent Saturday magazine, written by Will Self and called Psychogeography. I thought this was a term that Self had invented, but it turns out to be a concept that's been around since the 1950s. Reading through the Wikipedia entry, I learned that another photographic genre that I'm very keen on, Urban Exploration, or UrbEx, is also considered part of the psychogeographic canon.
 I'll leave you to explore the background if you wish, but let's get back to Dérive. Presented on this new site is a series of pictures drawn from the many thousands that he has made on his walks. There are a lot, I'm not sure how many in total, and they make an impressive series. The recommendation is to play the Flash slideshow full screen, and I have to say that on a 24" monitor they really come into their own.
Editing and sequencing them must have been a daunting and time-consuming task but the result hangs together extremely well. This is London as most people experience it, but never really notice. Perhaps it is when these seemingly unrelated images are presented in this form that the concept behind psychogeography becomes clearer. These are the kind of environments and juxtapositions that I have long been drawn to in photography. My own files contain hundreds of images of this type but not in such a consistent and descriptive form. They are the kind of photographs that many people may not give a second glance to were they to be presented in isolation. Somehow, the bringing together of the chosen images and the concepts behind them all make perfect sense to me; the viewer comes away having truly 'experienced' the environments.
 I was reminded of work by Hamish Fulton, another long-distance walker/artist and one - presumably - linked to the same psychogeographic experience. Fulton's work was mainly rural though, which is fine, and his 'art' was the walk itself, any photographs or text resulting from it being almost secondary (but still engaging) and a way of presenting his personal 'art experience' to a wider audience.
What I love about the work of Eric Perlberg is not only its pure use of photography, but the fact that it deals with the everyday, the places and visual stimuli that we all encounter regularly. After viewing Dérive and learning a bit about psychogeography, I found that I could appreciate 'Curiously Incongruous' in a different way. I could also start to give a name to my own tendencies and the things that I find curious and descriptive of urban environments that many take for granted.
I'll leave you with the 'artist's statement' from the opening page of Dérive:
"The 1950's social theorists known as the Situationist International coined the term psychogeography for their interest in the psychological dimensions of urban geography.
To study the relationship between the physical geography of an urban landscape and the psychological experience of it the Situationists developed a technique they termed dérive (drift). In "Theory of Dérive" Guy Debord, a leading SI theorist explained:
“In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.“
Since April 2004 I've made thousands of dérive and walked thousands upon thousands of kilometres through the streets and pathways of every part of London out to its very margins and from end to end. Following the psychogeographical countours of the landscape and with no other itinerary I photographed these unique attractions of the terrain to which I was drawn as described by Debord."
Trackback(0)
 |
TrackBack URI for this entry
Show/hide comments
Show/hide comment form