Traversal – Second Passage
Traversal – Second Passage continues to be occupied with the embodied and disembodied travel experience, while questioning the image’s ability to represent the lived experience, as first explored in Traversal – First Passage. Using still photographs to capture movement and duration this work addresses both the overwhelming nature of the Australian landscape and the compulsion we have to map landscape as a way to both possess and comprehend it.
Nightingale writes:
As the landscape flashed past the train window my overwhelming experienced of it was as a vast sublime space that seemed impossible to contain or hold down – even more so towards dusk when all the images for this series were taken. Battling with how to convey this feeling photographically I decided to let time unfold across the plane of the shutter. So rather than capture a decisive moment (which historically photography has been equated with) I wanted to record something that could be more understood as duration or the quality of a thing – in this case light, dark, substance, emptiness, everything, nothing…
Each one of the photographs in Traversal – Second Passage is presented with a time code recording the geographic coordinates and the time and date of its taking. In our compulsion to spatialise and map the landscape this work begs the question: how much does this abstract but regulatory information offer in understanding the real rhythms and practices of place?
