These types of walks were going to be in new perspectives compared to day 1’s brief. For this first walk, we were told to encounter our neighborhoods as tourists, as if everything we were seeing was for the leisure of simply seeing new things. So I decided to take a leisurely stroll on a separate path to the other ones I did the day before and I found myself looking at the familiar in an unusual way.
This walk brought about an entirely new gaze. I was seeing things through new eyes. It was almost as though I was pretending except I could feel the authenticity of my amazement when I noticed keen details on plants, for example in the first photograph, I noticed the small spines coming out of the leaf. This is not something I’d have noticed had I been looking for things in a physically different way as I had been the first walk. I took an up close picture to really show off the sharp spines coming out the sides as well as the nearly microscopic droplets from the recent rainfall on the leaf. Another interesting reflection after looking at these pictures is the one that slightly differentiates from the rest, the one I have included myself in. The reason for that is because I figured the most tourist-like thing to do would be to include myself in the picture. Not only for that reason but to showcase how miniscule I am in comparison to the massive tree right in front of me.
Walk 2
The purpose of this walk was to see things through a detectives gaze. I found myself looking at things very, very closely and piecing what I saw right in front of me together. We were told, as part of the brief, that we should be asking the questions of what happened and answering it through our photographs. In some of these photographs I managed to tie in the past and the possible future.
This walk I was once again playing a sort of persona, as if I was looking at a sort of crime scene and having to find objects that had links and made a story. On my walk, I managed to discover a couple of things that did indeed tie together, much to my surprise. An example of this was the sock. I found it sitting upright, snagged on a tree branch. It was sodden from the rain. I thought this was curious and, in the spirit of a detective, took an up close picture of it. As I continued along, keeping a keen eye out for something that may link to the odd sock, I discovered something protruding from a wet pile of leaves. I brushed some leaves off of it and discovered a replica of the other sock sitting about a meter away. This lead me to the assumption that these socks had come off of someone’s line in a strong breeze and had wound up here. I wrote in the notes how odd it was that someone’s ‘bad day’ became my good one. This is how these two photographs tie into the past and how, possibly, they may tie into the future too if their owner ever found them. Another example of a photo I took that was rather interesting was a wad of blue-tack I discovered on the trunk of tree. Originally, the tree was nothing special to me. In fact, it nearly passed my discovery until I decided to investigate it further and saw the blue tack. I used my lens to magnify it and found myself staring at an obvious bunch of finger prints. I found it so interesting that, through my lens and my new gaze, I had discovered a strangers finger prints. It’s something that people often correlate with identity and uniqueness so it was almost as though I was staring at someone’s uniqueness.