Project 5: Photography I The Frame Exercise 1: ‘The Square Mile’

‘In our earliest years we know a patch of ground in a detail we will never know anywhere again – site of discovery and putting names to things – people and places – working with difference and similitude – favourite places, places to avoid – neighbours and their habits, gestures and stories – textures, smells – also of play, imagination, experiment – finding the best location for doing things – creating worlds under our own control, fantasy landscapes.’

Professor Mike Pearson, at  https://learn.oca.ac.uk/mod/book/view.php?id=13918&chapterid=318 

This quote holds a great deal of appeal for me. I remember, from my own childhood, seeing all sorts of interesting details at ground level, and the seemingly soaring height of the buildings around me. I want to recapture some of that awe and wonder of early childhood when everything is a new discovery.

This exercise invites us to present a series of 6-12 ‘local’ photos, with reference to the concept of The Square Mile, the intimate relationship between a child and their homes environment.

My childhood home is 180 miles away, and none of my family still live there. I therefore turned my attention to my current home environment. I wanted to see it anew, with that childhood sense of wonder and imagination. I decided to take a series of photographs in the street outside my house, but to do so sitting on the pavement to bring my eyes to about toddler height. At this vantage point, closer to the ground, all sorts of memories unfurled: the fear of a big car rolling over me as I tripped and fell with my head between the wheels; the neighbours in a house on our street who we children avoided, and about which we told each other delightfully shivery stories; sitting in my pushchair gazing way up into the sky and watching the telegraph wires passing overhead.

Closer to the ground, everything took on a new perspective, so that things I walk past every day became new and previously unseen.

For my locations, I began by sitting on the pavement outside my front door, allowing myself to become very curious about what I could see from low down, and, interestingly, what I could no longer see from that height. Having taken a number of photos from there, I went 20 paces down the road and did the same there. Lastly, I returned to my front door and went to sit 20 paces up the road. These three locations, though very near to each other, revealed some interesting differences.

Here are my contact sheets.

From these, I selected 25 of what seemed to me to be the most promising photos, and put them into a separate album where I could see them side by side, and see which could work together as a set. From these I chose 12 images which particularly evoked a child’s perspective to me. There were some photos that I rejected because, although I was at child height, I was uphill of the subjects, which put them in a more normal scale. Here is an example of these.

Having chosen 12 photos that seemed to both have the perspective I wanted and form a series with common elements, such as colour and relationship to the other images. I did minor edits of cropping images where appropriate, but made no other alterations. 

When I considered captions, I thought that I might enhance the childlike perspective by the style of my captions. I wrote them all out in an approximation of the way that children write when they’re just beginning to learn how to do it. I have two young nephews so I’ve had the opportunity to observe children's writing over the last few years. 

In order to make an uncluttered presentation of my work I will place it into a new post.