Introduction


"You can resume your flight whenever you like," they said to me, "but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes."1

"Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places."2


My experience of the last 18 months has been one of constant travel. I have had so many different ideas of home, destination, and departure, that I feel like I am constantly missing or expecting something. It is as if I am nostalgic for a place I have yet to visit. In order to clarify and contain these contrasted feelings of emptiness and intimacy, I take pictures. I see myself not as a tourist, but as a traveller.

"The difference between a tourist and a traveller is that, the tourist carries his own atmosphere around him, while the traveller tries to lose himself in his surroundings."3

As a traveller I photograph not to validate and authenticate my journey, but to visually record of my experience of being part of a place. My work is not about specific destinations that are so important to the journey of a tourist, or about visiting sites that are part of a popular culture of an area. My Distance and Intimacy series, which began in 2003, and which I am culminating in my final honours year work, is comprised of a selection of photographic diptyches and triptychs that bring together images of architectural structures, combined with abstract forms and images of people. The images are combined to form a narrative, however small, of a sense of place.



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[1] Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Vintage Classics: London, 1997, 128.
[2] Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 28-29.
[3] Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels, Modern Library: New York, 2001, 9.