Reading Response 4

Last semester I was to capture b-roll for a documentary that I was either currently working on or could imagine making.

I went to the the West Village on a cloudy Spring day, trying to capture the mood of a neighbourhood I had been studying, in the context of the AIDS epidemic. I walked the streets looking for inspiration, when I found it I would stop, pull out my tripod, and pan up and down, left to right, in different motions, trying to capture a sense of melancholy and the rhythms and aesthetic of my reflexions. While I wasn’t with participants at the time, it was their stories of place their memories of Christopher Street, of bars like The Monster, Julius, of the the Piers, of friends and patners, that were inspiring my walk around the West Village. I wasn’t walking aimlessly, I was looking for indicators of resonance with the things I had learned from them. Here I was going beyond my teh abstraction of my research and having an embodied experience with place (place-as route, as Pink suggests) through the lens of the past (place as past event).

In another instance I was asked to pick a neighbourhood in NYC and attempt to capture the essence, the feel of the streets. I chose Chinatown.

Here I experienced the ‘sociability’ of walking that Pink’s article addresses, as I walked through the busy streets of Chinatown, moving through space in in communion with those around me. This creates a perception of empathy and perhaps even horizontality, in the video. However, I also think back to Dicks et al, discussion on the limitations of video, since upon watching the moving record of my experience, one misses a few key elements:

1. It was my frist time walking through the streets
2. I had no predetermined route
3. I was at times uncomfortable because I was carrying the HD Panasonic camera on my elbow
4. I am very self-conscious when people look at me and I try not to invade their space.

These truths informed the way I waled through the neighbourhood and the choices I instinctively made with regard to where I walked, where I panned, what I panned to, waht I zoomed, how long I allowed myself to stand still. etc.

In both of these cases I have explored walking with a camera as a means to place-making. The notion of walking as way of experiential research and multimodal research, appeals to me because I derive a sense of spirituality from it. It allows me to feel safe (imagine studying a place where it was unsafe to walk around and have this embodied experience), ti allows me to empathise more fully, and it provides me with another mode of data. Another literacy of sorts, to manipulate data.