Measures

“Traditional landscape photographers tend to view the landscape from a vantage point exterior to the scene and are customarily satisfied with one or perhaps a few highly selected, tightly framed views that represent the landscape’s entirety. Smithson explored landscapes with his Instamatic in a far more radical manner; instead of simply photographing landscapes from an external position, he was much more prone to placing himself inside them, picturing them from within, looking through them to other sections, and focusing ever inward on their details. For him, it was the difference between a “closed” landscape and an “open” one, where multiple and often contradictory views “reveal a clash of angles and orders within a sense of simultaneity [which in turn] shatters any predictable frame of reference”. - in Photo Works by Robert Smithson, 1993

Instructions: Your field notes, recordings, photo/video documentation, and memories of last week’s trip - lets call them, collectively, ‘images’ - will be the basis of a ‘third’ territory of investigation. The first two were Mississippi Hydraulics (the defined landscape) and Delta blues (the elusive landscape).

On the one hand, this ‘third’ territory may include the first two. We spent much time in our travels seeking out the defined and the elusive landscapes as we had explored them in studio. Sometimes we found them or signs of them; sometimes we did not. Where did we look? And how did we look? Did we see the Delta through ideas that came out of our earlier investigations? For example, did we see the Delta in moments of release (extending from Mich’s floodways and plotting of Charlie Patton’s wanderings) or in moments of division (extending from Akiko’s dredging and dredging of the blues) or in moments of crossings (extending from Michelle’s cutoffs and intersecting renditions of Crossings) or in moments of events (extending from Paul’s cutoff and construction of Blue’s space) or in moments of collection and dispersion (extending from Karen’s locks and navigation of Shout Out) or in moments of meander (extending from Yumi’s revetments and articulation of Blue’s bends) or in moments of thresholds and transitions (extending from Adam’s levees and exploration of Delta time) or in moments of trapping and surrender (extending from Hyo-Jung’s jetties and capillary action of the blues)?