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If you are keen to get out and about this spring, why not shake the cobwebs
off with a walking-based photography project? Tim Daly helps you take
the first steps with these brilliant ideas and suggestions.timdaly.com All images © Tim DalyPick a theme around your availability over
a forthcoming holiday break or weekend.
If you are planning an outdoor activity, even
better. Structure your walk not on distance
alone, but around one of the following ideas.SECTION 1:
THEMES TO CONSIDER
A SYMBOLIC WALKTECHNIQUEPROJECTS
IN VISUAL
STYLE1 A PERSONAL PILGRIMAGEW
alking for many of us is getting
from A to B, yet it can also
provide you with inspiring
ideas for new photographic
projects. Over recent years the combination
of walking, thinking and seeing has gained
traction among writers, travellers and artists,
resulting in projects and inspiring accounts.
Much of the most enthralling travel writing
has walking at its core and photographers
working with landscape and urban themes
base their understanding on a physical
experience. Yet walking doesn’t have to
be exotic, remote or treacherous; instead it
can be undertaken in an urban space with
a symbolic or personal motive behind it.
For this project we’re going to explore
the ways you can connect walking
with creativity, while exercising your
observational skills and well-being at the
same time. Background reading could
include The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch,
Walking the High Line by Joel Sternfeld and
Small World by Martin Parr.1The physical act of walking or running has
long been used by pilgrims for its cathartic
and restorative powers, but also by those
doing it for a charitable cause or a personal
motive. More recently, there have been
interesting studies on how walking can
contribute to well-being too. Rather than
frame a walk around somebody else’s
route, an alternative is to plot and plan a
personal walk around sites and locations
that have a special significance to you. If
you’re interested in combining photography
with writing, this kind of project could be an
ideal way to start, perhaps by placing photo
prints in a journal or using a blog to fuse
text and image together. Allowing yourself to
write also gives you permission to make less
illustrative photographs too.INSPIRATIONAL QUOTE‘Walkers are ‘‘practitioners of the city,’’ for the city is
made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of
possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that
language, of selecting from those possibilities.’
Rebecca Solnit