Walking Thursday June 2, 2005
There’s an interesting book called Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Rebecca Solnit 2001), in which the author investigates the various forms and meanings of this activity, usually taken for granted but having implicit cultural and psychological depths. One of the chapters is called The Mind at Three Miles an Hour, suggesting the meditative or anti-rat race quality of walking as opposed to commuting, working, watching TV etc – the activities that fill up a normal day, in which the mind is active at a considerably faster pace. “What is life if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare”, said poet WH Davies. Or walk and stare, perhaps, at the equally soothing pace of just three miles an hour.
The urge to wander and explore is probably linked to a primordial past, when we inhabited forests, plains and prairies. We established our dominion over those lands in a basic and territorial impulse, based on survival. And it continued over thousands of years, culminating in the extraordinary complexities of the modern city. In which the old parts of the psyche are still played out, but at different levels. We feed, wander, colonise and congregate in terms of money-making actitivities, houses, offices, shops and the ubiquitous car which, in a curiously modern place like Los Angeles, has almost completely usurped the place of human locomotion.
In my youth, I was fascinated and seduced by the aesthetic/philosophy of cycling, as advocated in a volume fondly remembered by enthusiasts, Richard’s Bicycle Book (Ballantine 1981). He questioned the car-centric, compartmentalised urban life where we typically allocate separate time for work, recreation and exercise, with dubious economic ramifications. How much energy and resources are expended when we drive five miles to the supermarket, the office, or the pub? How long does it take us in a busy city (London especially), how much pollution does it create, and doesn’t it make sense to use that time to exercise and release the stress of the day, rather than create more, because we get frustrated with congested roads? Ballantine argued that most car journeys are relatively short, easily negotiated by bicycle (although perhaps more applicable to North America than the UK). And for myself, just prior to university in the 1980s, a bicycle made economic sense because it offered localised transport, liberating me from bus fares and timetables. I saved, and spent £300 on a lighweight bike which I used almost very day going to and from university, for shopping, and everything else. I skidded along snow-covered roads as fast as I could because despite the exertion I was getting interminably colder, and in summer wore shorts and tee shirt for expeditions into the Lancashire countryside. I delighted in whizzing down long ascents at such a speed I overtook all the cars. I once tore down a road to beat the traffic lights, leaving me with no room to brake and negotiate the right hand bend – and with a broken clavicle. It was an integral part of my student life inspired by economic facts, an ecological aesthetic, and a delight in vigorous outside exercise.
I no longer cycle and would argue that it suits my life to have a car, enabling me to get to places quickly and conveniently without effort, also allowing me to travel to anywhere in the country with considerable freedom. But I have a romantic and nostalgic fondness for Ballantine’s ideas, and acknowledge that the bicycle is a sensible proposition in relation to city centre congestions, and appreciate that cycling does integrate exercise into your daily life – such a wonderfully wholesome idea.
There are different kinds of photography, like studio-based work, which are unrelated to perambulatory pleasures. But for me part of the fun is being outside, in the open-air theatre of unpredictable circumstance. I don’t pursue it for exercise but I acknowledge that it ties in with a ‘philosophy of the outside’, discerned more clearly in relation to cycling and walking. And carrying a camera gives you a set of aims and motivations as you walk around streets, countryside, or a foreign destination: you enjoy the experience of being outside or watching passing life, and another part of you is observing the configurations of people, scenery and circumstance with your aesthetic intentions, making it doubly interesting. It depresses me that when I walk and drive generally around Manchester, I almost never encounter photographic opportunitities. 90% of my success revolves around a definite plan in which I travel to a specific place that I know will be photographically interesting, and that’s where I get my fun: as with the Lake District fells, or ocassionally with the city of London. It takes me about 2 hours to drive to the former and four or five for the latter, which is only feasible as part of protracted visit of several days. But once I am there I can enjoy walking around, feasting on the photographic potential as I walk.
Henry David Thoreau wrote an extended essay called Walking, in which he extolled the virtues of this activity. He apparently did it every day, often for periods of several hours, and regarded it as an essential component of a balanced and healthy life. I disagree with some aspects of his North American Transcendentalism, not least of which is the fact that you need leisure and beautiful surrounding to appreciate his ideas. There’s nothing beautiful about walking around many city streets, and you can’t do it like he did if you need to be at work, or maybe feeding or entertaining the children. But despite this, Thoreau’s essay about life in the North American forests is an inspiring treatise on what walking can be, and how it balances and soothes you, and it also resonates with some of the pleasures and satisfactions of photography which requires that you take time to observe and appreciate your surroundings, as you walk.
I wonder what part being outside plays in the fun of the hobby photographer. As with fishing, it’s an activity that gives you a reason to be there. This is certainly true for me; I enjoy creating photos but also enjoy walking around outside, especially when the surroundings are green, peaceful and attractive. As Thoreau said:
I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil – to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilisation: the minister and the school-committee, and every one of you will take care of that.