Site seeing 1: Walking and Driving
Meggan Gould

My photographic examinations of landscapes, both physical and virtual, serve as a visual starting point for the larger theoretical concerns in my work, namely considerations of vision, the human eye, and assumptions implicit in photographic representation. While these works may at first seem quite disparate in artistic intent and execution, they are united in those theoretical explorations concerning the very nature of vision, and what it means to look, to see, to regard, to gaze . . . with and through the perceptive capabilities and fallibilities of the human eye. I seek to distill the experience of vision from conventions surrounding its representation, and I have narrowed my focus, directed an analysis of my gaze, on landscape--in the broadest sense of the word--to concretely explore an example of a dichotomy between lived experience and conventions of photographic representation.

The images in this series are photographed while walking, driving, bicycling, gliding through landscapes on buses or trains. The continuity of my motion is not interrupted for the blink of the shutter; the camera, clenched in my right hand, documents as much the swing of my step as it does the subject that triggered my finger to press the shutter release. Often, in fact, the latter escapes the frame altogether--hand/eye/subject/shutter coordination is surprisingly difficult at 60 miles per hour--and the processed film reveals fragments of the passing landscape that I often do not remember having seen.

At: http://www.meggangould.net/site_seeingI.htm

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