Field Trip Magazine

This week saw the launch of Field Trip Magazine; the first of edition of which is dedicated to analogue photography and includes a small selection of photographs taken from my latest film Traversal - Third Passage. The film Traversal - Third Passage is the third instalment of a trilogy of work occupied with the Australian landscape as perceived from the train window as I travelled from Melbourne to Darwin and back again.

All elements of Traversal are in some way are concerned with exploring perception and blurring the boundaries between the still and moving image. In Third Passage, a film made from 54 single photographs, the still image is animated and gives the viewer no opportunity for the considered observation of the single image which we tend to expect from photography. Instead in the film the 54 still images flick by in a frenzy of changing patterns and rhythms that build towards an overwhelming crescendo. 

In Field Trip Magazine 12 of these images are isolated and time is frozen on the page giving opportunity for observation of these normally fleeting photographs.

The spread as it appears in Field Trip Magazine, Issue 1, Summer 2010.

Ideas / thoughts on Traversal: A work in progress part one

Traverse (verb)

Move across an area: transitive verb to travel or move across, over, or through an area or a place

To go back and forth across something: transitive and intransitive verb to move backwards and forwards across something

Traverse (noun)

Movement across an area: a movement or journey across, over, or through something

Route taken: a route or way across, over, or through something


Traversal is a new project that I am working on that intends to explore the relationship between the embodied and disembodied travel experience.

The framework for this project is grounded in historical changes that took place in the 19th century with the emergence of the railroad as a dominant form of transportation - taking over from the stage coach and walking, for example. I am particularly interested the effect this development had on perception for those traveling. Wolfgang Schivelbusch1 has suggested that the railway journey made possible a new way of perceiving the landscape that was very different from earlier forms of travel experience. Schivelbusch claims that, for the passenger, rail travel supported a panoramic perception of the terrain; this suggestion is put at odds to a multi-sensual engagement with the environment that was much more the case in pre-industrialized forms of transportation. In panoramic perception, Schivelbusch suggests, the traveler sees objects and landscapes mediated through the apparatus of the train. In this, the space of the traveler and the space of the perceived objects is separated and there is dissolution of the embodied experience. The landscape becomes a moving panorama, passing at speed outside the train window - one could imagine this like a movie projected on the window, where the only sensory experience of the landscape is vision - a vision that is separated from any further bodily experience.

To explore these ideas I undertook to traverse the landmass of Australia by train - from the bottom of the country to the top and back again. A journey of 6786km, comprising three train journeys, totaling 124 hours of train travel made during seven days travel. The journey started in Melbourne, Victoria; traveling to Darwin in the Northern Territory and ended in Adelaide, South Australia. All the railroads taken had played a historical role in the industrialization of Australia's transportation system; the earliest route taken was completed in 1888.

The experience of the journey was translated to visual, sonic and written representation using various apparatus, such as: still photography - digital and celluloid, moving image - video, field recordings and written observations.

My main attention was directed to the grand vista and the subtle detail.


1. Schivelbusch, W., The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, New ed., Leamington Spa, UK: Berg. 1986.