space: boundless, infinite
place: defined, measured
Photographs
Photographs are another sort of surrogate place. Compared with paintings, photographs are deficient -- lacking in certain aesthetic qualities -- largely because the artist's control over them is incomplete. On the other hand, precisely because they are beyond the artist's total control, photographs exude a pathos particular to real that paintings do not have. A photograph is not just a representation of reality, it is a bit of reality transmitted to and retained by a coated surface through physical and chemical means. When we see a bright patch on the photography, we know that it is put there more by a bare cliff deflecting sunlight than by the artful manipulations of the photographer. When we look at a the smile of a child in a faded photograph and smile back, we know that we are responding not just to a painter's illusionary skills, but to the smile of a real child -- now probably an old woman or dead -- who once stood five feet from the camera.
Unplanned elements in a photography also contribute to a sense of reality. In real life, as in a photograph, the beer can on top of the fridge, the tumbleweed wedged between two boulders, are not put there by design: they are there either accidentally or through the operation of physical laws. Painting, by contrast, typically exclude the accidental: everything in a painting is where it is for an artistic reason. Awareness of this fact makes even the most realistic painting a little unreal. Another difference between a painted picture and a photograph is this. Where as both enable the viewer to contemplate process, the painting does not tell the viewer that an end or consummation is imminent. The photograph does. John Keats famously says that the lover painted on the Grecian urn will never kiss, and we know he is right. However, if we see these lovers in a photograph, we know as we do when we see them in real life that, unless heaven falls, their lips will touch.
Early photographs were confined by their technical limitations to recording immobile objects. As technology improves, more and more pictures are taken of things on the move and even in rapid motion. Through exposure to both kinds of photographs, we develop the habit of dwelling imaginatively not only on stable objects -- houses neighborhoods, landscapes, but also on objects in transit -- the train pulling out of the station, the hand raised to say good-bye. Objects so caught give the places in which they occur a vibrancy or poignancy that these places would not otherwise have. Photographs thus promote our sensitivity to place -- our sense of place. They are also surrogate places in that we can visit and revisit them whenever our spirit needs rest or rejuvenation.
Movies
Later that the photograph in establishing a hold on people's consciousness is the movie; hence one might think of it as a more distant cousin of place. But why consider place it a relationship of place at all? On first thought, the movie cannot be place in any sense because it embraces time. In a movie, one event follows another. Even in its quiet moments, when time seems to slow down, a neighbor may still be shown mowing the lawn, a cat chasing a ball. The movie reminds us too much of the restlessness of real life, even exaggerate it, making us yearn for a pause, for a place where we can forget time and motion. Yet one reason we go to the movies is to take a breather from the demand of time -- from having to do things now rather than later. Movies, it turns out, are as much bound space -- a world or place -- as it is bound time. Indeed, movies are more place than time because, whereas we can never go back and live in an earlier time, we can return to a movie. And that's how we treat our favorite movies. If we see them more than once, it is not so much to understand their plot better as to return to worlds that, for some reason, have the power to enthrall.
Movies, I say are places. But maybe I speak in metaphors. It certainly is true that movies can invoker place. They do so with images and sounds: normal images of the sorts that people experience at ground level and bird's eye views that are no part of daily human experience; normal sounds such as those of a shrieking kettle indoor and the swoosh of passing cats outdoor, and sounds that are not part of daily life, by which I mean the music that the movie director adds to a scene, subtly in that background or loudly in the foreground, to create or enhance a mood.
Let me now make a confession. I have seen the movie Gone With the Wind at least a dozen times, the first time in 1942, when I was a child. My English was not good then. I could not understand much that was said. The Civil War, as history, meant nothing to me. The South, as geography, meant little more. So, why did the movie have this kind of grip? Could it be the war itself, always exciting to a child? The plot line? Yes, in part. But these excitements could not outlast the first viewing, and yet I returned to the movie again and again. I returned to it as I would to a fond place. For, after several viewings, Gone With the Wind became a place foe me. The movie implanted in my awakening imagination a South of red earth, cotton fields, plantation houses, afternoon siestas and elegant parties. But is also awakened in me, through simplistic images and story lines that a child could understand, longings for romance, gallantry, noblesse oblige, courage, and indomitable will that remains with me unassuaged to this day, making me slightly ridiculous in the eyes of sophisticated friends who know the real, far darker history of the South. (49-51)
Tuan continues on and discusses poems, stories, novels and music and the language of "place". Finally, he reached the next relevant excerpt on the sense of place and the individual and time(less)ness:
Place, I have been saying, slows down time, stops it, and can even -- by offering the possibility of return -- reverse it. We are comfortable in place, but not in time, as though we are atemporal creatures, inexplicitly ensnared by the temporal stream. We catch ourselves saying, 'How he's grown!' and 'How time flies!' as though a universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty (Lewis 1958, 158). In other cultures and in earlier periods of history, people have not found time quite so problematic or burdensome. There was certainly less talk about it less explicit awareness of it as a personal problem. A variety of reasons explain this apparent lack of concern. First is the absence of a sense of an individual self apart from the group. Only the individual human being is truly subject to time, for only the individual lives and dies. The group by comparison is immortal. Second, the material place of premodern peoples stays much the same from one generation to the next. Neither their natural nor their built environment contains obvious and constant reminders of time's relentless, one-directional passage. Third, when time consciousness does intrude, it is obliterated by sacred rites, during which the dead reappear to mix with the living, and the atemporal status of human beings is reaffirmed. I am saying, then, that people everywhere do not just roll along with the temporal flow in total acceptance and innocence, as animals presumably do. I would also say that place is the means most readily at hand to overcome this sense of ceaseless flow. (53)
Excerpt taken from:
Reanimating Place: A Geography of Rhythms
Tom Mels(editor)
Ashgate Publishing Company, Burlington, VT: 2004.
Footnote:
Lewis, C.S. (1958) Reflections on the pslams. Harcourt, Brace New York .
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