Sense of Place, Or, I Heart My Town
Or, When Words are Not Enough,
Or, How's the Writing Going?
Here are a few examples of how I "sense" Truth or Consequence. Carlos Padilla captures the town in such a way that his photos are like little love notes that I love to read. He creates a particular and lovey sense of place in his photographs that accords with my own experience. Keith Basso prefers the active "sensing of place" over the more popular and commonly used "sense of place. (Wisdom Sits in Places, 143). Sensing of place is a form of cultural activity he contends. We all take part in this activity to varying degrees. I am rereading this text for the umpteenth time, a task I hope to write about with some small measure of clarity sometime soon. It is my guidebook. Basso claims Albert Camus has the best sense of place definition. Camus writes that senses of place is not merely known or felt, but something "people do," which Basso proclaims "brings the whole idea rather firmly down to earth" (143). Exactly where the sense of place belongs he says.
I have spent the last week looking at a few contemporary photo books of the town. They are studies in contrasts. I actually find myself muttering "asshole," when I look at a certain book. Here is an outtake of a "review" of this collection on Amazon:
"Nick Waplington has been taking photographs in and around Truth or Consequences, a small town in New Mexico, for nearly 10 years. Typical and unremarkable in many ways, the town voted to change its name to that of a celebrated radio quiz show in 1950. Waplington records the town behind the extraordinary name, the lives of its people and the landscape they live in while at the same time constructing a personal tribute to American photography, paying stylistic homage to such great pioneers of the genre as Edward Weston and Walker Evans. A highly original and strikingly perceptive work, Truth or Consequences is as thought-provoking as it is aesthetically absorbing, as it introduces us to another world whose human reality remains timelessly arresting." Or this, also on Amazon: "As the subject of photographer Nick Waplington's captivating lens, the town's name takes on a profundity that defies its frivolous origin. His portraits and landscape shots follow the bizarre yet somehow ordinary lives of the inhabitants of "T or C", as well as paying homage to the great pioneers of American photography such as Edward Weston and Walker Evans. These stunning yet commonplace photographs were shot over a period of ten years, during which Waplington revisited the town many times. Drawn together in a book for Phaidon, 'Truth or Consequences' has been hailed as his most extensive and enthralling study since 'Living Room' ...' Dazed and Confused 'The book captures some genuinely affecting moments ... while also offering generous tributes to past masters of American photography.' Time Out '
Yet another: " Nick Waplington has captured the combined weirdness and ordinariness of the everyday, the disused and the down-at-heel. Like a wide-screen road-movie, images of American popular culture collide.' Evening Standard."
Several lines should alert the alert reader why I mutter asshole every so often. It is a horrible, voyeuristic and contrived work. I really enjoy disturbing and unsettling images of people and places. But these photos do not challenge understandings or fashion new ones. Rather, these photos are as place-less as most American commercial strips. And even strip malls can be cool places, unless you are convinced they are not. Depends on what you look at, and how you look. It is theory and method.
The photographs are the antithesis of every photograph that I have culled from Carlos Padilla's facebook page. The photos here are picture-perfect instagram-washed loveliness for sure, but as I struggle to start my public dissertation writing, as promised, but perhaps not deliverable for a while longer, these are the images that I need to see. Thanks Sherry Fletcher, for buying me my own book to critique (call me at 505.917.9111 if you want to look at it at Passion Pie or the Happy Belly Deli or the Flying Star) and talking me through every method and theory issue.
You can't have places without having people. I have such good people.
Basso writes that an "ethnographer must somehow fashion a written account that adequately conveys his or her understandings of other people's understandings" (110). Basso says ethnography "discomforting businesses which lose ends abound and nothing is ever certain." I have been trying to make sense of this sense of place. Or rather, other people's sense of this place, and how they make sense of it as well. If that makes sense. Hahaha. My progress is slow but steady, which Basso notes is the hopeful end to fieldwork. The transition from now-monthly comments on my field work interviews and observations to the task of making sense and writing about those moments in a continuous narrative has stymied me a little. A lot. It is discomforting. So I am going to allow a little more time to enjoy the process of ethnography. A little more time to enjoy the process of making sense of what I have done this last year and change. Not too much. I write this in case my committee meanders through this post, but enough to enjoy the view for a few more weeks.
This is what Basso contends is often missing or hidden from ethnographic accounts. It is a great deal of fun. The doing it can be joyful. Like a photograph (a topic I have covered at length in these pages), we can take a moment to burrow in the sheer loveliness of what we chose to see before we emerge to examine all that we overlook and all that needs attending to with a more critical eye in our landscapes. That's where I will leave it for today. Clenched teeth and furrowed brow are no guarantee of literary success," writes Basso. So I am going to wander around the town for a little while longer, taking only photographs and leaving only footprints. I jest. But I do think a photo essay of my own, on the bathhouses that have been the foundation for the sense of place in the Downtown Historic Bathhouse and Commercial District, might be in order.
