FROM THE LIMINAL TO THE SUBLIME

Bathing in the Edgelands of the North East

In the book “Edgelands, Journeys into England’s True Wilderness” by poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, the writers make a plea for people to “put aside our nostalgia for places we’ve never really known and see them afresh” when speaking about the hollows and spaces between our towns, cities, and nature reserves with nicely maintained car parks and picnicking areas. The places we pass through quickly on our way to other places, be they places of work, recreation, relaxation or leisure conducted in spaces that have been designed to satisfy our desires and remove our need to spend too long outdoors in places that could be dirty, unsafe, or offer little in the way of diversion and entertainment. 

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My current area of research is using pinhole cameras made from discarded or unwanted materials to capture a day, week, or months in the life of these edgeland and liminal spaces to truly see them afresh. I wish to combine traditional alternative photographing methods with modern-day practices of engaging with our environments such as the Japanese practice of shirin-yoku, or forest bathing, in order to see them as new spaces, observe the impact of time on their landscapes, and gain a new perspective of the lives of places that many of us forget or would not consider worthy of our attention. 

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This project will be presented as an online gallery combining scans of pinhole photographs with short descriptions of the areas in which they were made, as well as an eBook that will be made available for free on my website. I believe that photography should be available and accessible for everybody, regardless of how much they own, how much they can afford, how much spare time they might have, and whether they think they are skilled enough to be a “real” photographer. Photography is a simple joy that everybody should be free to be a part of and participate in. 

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I intend to show that by using the most basic and most primitive of photographic processes with materials that would otherwise be disregarded, you can make images that reflect the atmosphere and life of an otherwise primitive and disregarded place. By bathing photographic paper in light, it will leave its impression and what the camera sees.  

The world is saturated with perfect bright images of perfect places that are out of reach to so many, and I want to be able to create something unique and sublime from the liminal spaces that we often find ourselves in without considering that these places have their own value that just needs to be found.