Polly Braden; 'Adventures in the valley'.
A collaborative project between photographers Polly Braden and David Campany to document the landscape of the River Lea in London before it changes when the 2012 Olympic site is developed there. they photographed the landscape, people and communities that live / work / play along the river' s edge.
http://pollybraden.com/work/adventures-in-the-valley/
Alice Oswald recorded many conversations she had with those who live and work on or near Dart River (in Devon). She used their voices, dialects, expressions, pleating them into this long multi-faceted text.
The resulting text is a mix of prose poetry rendering carefully selected and adjusted spoken language (the text never sounds as if it was the simple transcription of taped conversations) and quite lyrical poetry in stanzas.
It changes rhythm, tone, is rich in alliterations and plays on sounds. "Dart" refers to local people as well as to characters form the Greco-roman mythology.
The fact the poem goes on over 48 pages gives it a flowing quality, which cleverly suggests a river. Since the Dart is very short, most of the river is affected by the nearby sea's tides, and the mentioned animals, birds and fish can be either fluvial or marine.
Alice Oswald has managed to stitch sections end to end with almost invisible seams. She just changes subjects, makes them flow into each other.
This is a radically atypical piece, a long, creative journey into a world of water and words.
Richard Long
Artist who made art works by going on specific walks and recording them in maps, photographs or text works. He also made land based natural sculptures along the way. eg a line of rocks showing the path that he' d taken.
Dan Eldon; the journey is the destination;
Dan Eldon; the journey is the destination;
Very famous for his sketchbooks; travelled around and kept really beautiful, highly detaled sketchbooks about his experiences on his travels. 'The collage notebooks he left stand as rich documents of a rare spirit, and the story of his life is a collage, too-of places and peoples and journey and friendships and war and love.'
his mission statement: "Safari as a Way of Life: To explore the unknown and familiar, distant and near, and to record in detail with the eyes of a child, any beauty (of the flesh or otherwise) horror, irony, traces of Utopia or Hell . . ."
Eldon was renowned as one of the first photographers to document the famine and anarchy in Somalia in the early nineties. Ironically, in 1993-when he was just twenty-two years old and the youngest photojournalist ever hired by Reuters - Eldon was killed by a Somali mob. the time of his death, Dan Eldon had worked as a graphic designer in New York; studied (intermittently) at four colleges; traveled through Europe, Africa, Japan, and the U.S; founded a charity for Mozambican refugees; directed a film; written a book; started up his own photography business; and become a Reuters photojournalist. Through all this living, Eldon crafted a philosophy of curiosity, creativity, adventure, and charity.
The journey is the destination is an exploration of one young man's will to take in everything life has to offer; an example of a life lived for art, and an art experienced as life.
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