Photographic and sound Investigations

Words and Sounds

A collection of essays on photography and sound documentaries.

Posts in Essay
🔊 Invasions

Once in a while the world seems to go into a convulsion. World wars, natural disasters, economic recessions, famines and disease outbreaks. Covid-19 pandemic is one of those times. Rennie’s River became my escape route and a place to think about connections between viruses, urban planning, invasive plants and health - our own and our planet’s.

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Photography, Ethics, Politics…

When it comes to documentary photography and especially photojournalism, conversations about ethics have been around for a very long time, dating right back to the beginning of the medium. I think what has changed is the nature of those conversations and that change is driven largely by people for whom photography, especially documentary photography, is something they study rather than do.

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Revisiting the Islands

Islands are different places. And not just because their geography is compelling with their edges defined by the meeting of the worlds of land and water. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan saw them as having a “tenacious hold on the human imagination.” They help us imagine worlds that could be, they shape our understanding of the world that is, and provide us with grounds for experimentation, leisure, discovery, confinement, and unimaginable destruction.

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Place and Stimmung

Anne Buttimer, an Irish geographer, has a lovely definition of what it means to dwell in a place: “To dwell implies more than to inhabit, to cultivate, or to organize space,” she writes. “It means to live in a manner which is attuned to the rhythms of nature, to see one’s life as anchored in human history and directed toward a future, to build home which is the everyday symbol of a dialogue with one’s ecological and social milieu.”

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