This morning I have been reflecting on how photographers create a sense of place in their imagery. I am inclined to believe that so much of the meanings we attach to the things we see and photograph are far less connected to the denotative and objective but entirely bound to personal subjectivities, idealizations and myths we hold about the world and our experience in it.
Last Decemeber I wrote about memory and the image:
Memory is the desire to possess and reconstruct some part of a life from scraps of how things used to be. Memory is tricky -- all weighty illusions of things recalled and recognized.
This is the weight of images in our world -- mental images, dreams, and mediated messages -- all part of our consciousness and unconsciousness. As Hanno Hardt, suggests "....facing a photograph becomes a confrontation with past experiences, it challenges the imagination to think beyond the surface qualities of the image."
Ernst Cassierer argues in Language and Myth how reality becomes reduced to a kind of fiction because using language to describe and explain something always to seem to fall short of the original. Albeit a very loose reading of Cassierer ideas, this is realm we are working in with photography -- a realm of imagination, recall, recollection, memory, emotion, and symbolism.
At the same time, according to Cassierer, "All symbolism harbors the curse of mediacy; it is bound to obscure what it seeks to reveal." Within a context of sense of place, the photographer's ability to transcend the mundane through the aesthethics of the frame is connected to our desire to be less Xerox machine and more reflective of the environments we experience.