Taken To Another Place
2015
Opening Remarks, Professor Paul Kane, Vassar College New York at The Art Vault, Mildura 2015.
“The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” —Marcel Proust
Paul Lambeth’s photographs are likely to strike us as both familiar and strange. Familiar, because we recognize the territory he is engaging; strange, because seeing it through his eyes—through his sensibility—has a way of defamiliarizing it (what the Russians call ostranenie, their term for the way art returns the world to us afresh and vibrant). In that sense, Paul’s work exemplifies perfectly the remark by Marcel Proust, that “The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” That is what we are given here: new eyes with which to see.
In these photographs we are, indeed, “taken to another place” within a place we already know, or thought we knew. To travel by car in this landscape is to be carried along in a narrative of our own creation, as each scene emerges and recedes like a chapter in a novel. Paul’s photographs make us aware of this unconscious or subconscious process. On the road, we are driven to an apprehension of the land that is highly personal and therefore highly imaginative. Only the imagination can deal with the speed at which we move, as the discursive mind is overwhelmed by the constant stream of unprocessed visual impressions. No wonder Queen Victoria, on her maiden train voyage in 1842, stipulated a rate of 40 mph during the day and 30 at night.
“Taken to another place” also points to another process, whereby space and place are intertwined. The great geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan, has explained how space, often experienced as openness and extension can also pose a sense of unease and fear; it is more abstract than place, which connotes a particular location, something more familiar and known. “Place,” he says, “is security, space is freedom.” Each depends upon the other for understanding, and Paul’s photographs suggest how this operates, as we have the extraordinary immensity of Australian space experienced within the intimate confines of one’s own vehicle, a place that can almost feel like an extension of oneself: je suis ma voiture or lo sono la mia auto. Even the close up photographs seem vast in their intensity.
These two worlds, then, of space and place come together in the photographs because they cannot exist for us without a co-dependency. In a sense they forge a unity, a totality. Each photograph is a revelation of our complex world as we make it, and re-make it, through our constant imaginative process of being human.
I invite you, therefore, to journey with Paul Lambeth here this evening, where—I assure you— you will be taken to another place.
—Paul Kane
“The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” —Marcel Proust
Paul Lambeth’s photographs are likely to strike us as both familiar and strange. Familiar, because we recognize the territory he is engaging; strange, because seeing it through his eyes—through his sensibility—has a way of defamiliarizing it (what the Russians call ostranenie, their term for the way art returns the world to us afresh and vibrant). In that sense, Paul’s work exemplifies perfectly the remark by Marcel Proust, that “The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” That is what we are given here: new eyes with which to see.
In these photographs we are, indeed, “taken to another place” within a place we already know, or thought we knew. To travel by car in this landscape is to be carried along in a narrative of our own creation, as each scene emerges and recedes like a chapter in a novel. Paul’s photographs make us aware of this unconscious or subconscious process. On the road, we are driven to an apprehension of the land that is highly personal and therefore highly imaginative. Only the imagination can deal with the speed at which we move, as the discursive mind is overwhelmed by the constant stream of unprocessed visual impressions. No wonder Queen Victoria, on her maiden train voyage in 1842, stipulated a rate of 40 mph during the day and 30 at night.
“Taken to another place” also points to another process, whereby space and place are intertwined. The great geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan, has explained how space, often experienced as openness and extension can also pose a sense of unease and fear; it is more abstract than place, which connotes a particular location, something more familiar and known. “Place,” he says, “is security, space is freedom.” Each depends upon the other for understanding, and Paul’s photographs suggest how this operates, as we have the extraordinary immensity of Australian space experienced within the intimate confines of one’s own vehicle, a place that can almost feel like an extension of oneself: je suis ma voiture or lo sono la mia auto. Even the close up photographs seem vast in their intensity.
These two worlds, then, of space and place come together in the photographs because they cannot exist for us without a co-dependency. In a sense they forge a unity, a totality. Each photograph is a revelation of our complex world as we make it, and re-make it, through our constant imaginative process of being human.
I invite you, therefore, to journey with Paul Lambeth here this evening, where—I assure you— you will be taken to another place.
—Paul Kane
