Ever since I bought my first digital camera I've been taking photos out of train windows. I love the blurred landscapes often with distorted reflections superimposed .
I used some of the photos in journal quilts in 2004 and 2005, including one about my experience on 7/7/2005 when I was on the last train from Kings Cross seconds before the bombs went off. I was at a meeting in Peterborough and thought I would be stranded there with no information about what had happened to friends and family. In the end I got home very late thanks to someone giving me a lift well out of his way and coming into Ealing from Reading on the train.
Several times I've thought of returning to this idea of a sequence of blurred photos taken out of a train, inspired by the 'Separate Landscape' series of
Atsuhide Ito - a serialization of Utagawa Hiroshige's
The 53 Stations of the Tokaido from 1833.
The question is which series of photos to use?? The ones I took in Japan are probably the most interesting partially due to the speed of the Shinkansen. I loved the familiarity of the images ( tracks, pylons , stations, etc) but also the differences: the scale of landscape, the colours (bright green rice fields) and shapes of buildings.
2 comments:
Jings, Margaret, you get around...in the nicest possible way. Interesting photographs, and work, looks like you're sorted ;-)
You sure do! The last train from Kings Cross story is enough to make your blood run cold, but I'm glad it turned out ok.
The stumbling block for me on this one is that what I see out of the window is the same as I see without the window being there.....if you get my drift. The only way to make the window element come into it is by making it part of the image, or if you have a window such as stained glass etc, or are moving at speed, then you can use distortions. Still thinking.
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