I’m interested in how my project investigating the experience of the train journey from Marden to London could be interpreted if I read it from the perspective of Marc Augé’s Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. Here’s what he says about landmarks:
The train flies through the countryside.
The scenery is peppered with landmarks. Different views from the imagination, from history and from various periods of time proliferate in apparent disorder, arranged around a central core of ‘ancient places and rhythms’ – sites of long-standing ritual, rites and ceremonies. Modernity doesn’t obliterate the pull of these traditional places but forces it into the background, distancing the observer from the place itself. These spaces survive – preserved – as gauges ‘indicating the passage and continuation of time’. ‘The specialized words of the liturgy, of ‘ancient ritual’’ underline the entire structure, contrasting with the ‘song and chatter’ of everyday life.
‘Place is completed through the word, through the allusive exchange of a few passwords’ between those who speak the same language and connive ‘in private complicity’.
This perspective from Augé paints the journey in a rather more romantic light than I have been seeing it in. Evocative subterfuge or a truth that eludes me?
Reference: Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, trans. by John Howe, 2nd ed., (London: Verso, 2008 [Non-Lieux, Introduction a une anthropologie de la surmodernite, 1992]). 1st ed. published 1995, pp.61:63, p.74)
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The next test is about the still itself; drawing it and exploring how it can be combined with the original imagery:
The still on the right has no gap between the print and glass whereas the one on the left does and so gives a slightly more 3-D effect even more noticeable in real life.
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