Fieldnotes: Brendon Hill
Crumbs
And maybe on the Severn side,
Hung low on Brendon’s mound…
‘The Malvern Hills‘
In Songs of Three Counties and Other Poems
Fieldnotes
13 July 2022
Took a recce around Malvern Wells, and found White Cottage.
Went to a pub on the saddle between Herefordshire and Worcestershire – walked back to catch sunset and moonrise along the ridge. Found the backside of White Cottage.
From the top of Brendon Hill looked over the valleys in several directions, back and forward, spinning around as if looking over my shoulder all the time.
I speculated about White Cottage, and speculated on the poems.
Potential for questions about what the domestic is, ‘setting up house’.
Potential Peripatetic Prompt:
Account for / resist certainties cameras create …
PROMPT: Point the camera toward where the location ‘might’ be without looking up coordinates. Take up to three pictures somewhere that feels right geographically. Next, thinking with the reference, look at your surroundings and find something that demonstrates the ‘feeling’ that place generates and take up to three photos this way. Third: using a GPS device, point yourself in the direction of the place and try, without changing location, to take that photo. If you can get to the location, take one ‘head on’ photo as if you are cataloguing it as a property reference.
THEORY: Describe a genealogy of ‘speculating’ with a lens – think-with Haraway (1988), Massumi (2002) and Barthes (1982). Share how photography has been instrumentalised for land management, start with a poem from Hall about a particular view of the valley from the Malvern Hills to Upton she liked.
Barthes, R. (1982) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by R. Howard. Hill and Wang. Haraway, D. (1988) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist studies: FS, 14(3), pp. 575–599. Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press. (chapter on ‘Chaos in the “Total Field” of Vision, the unbearable lightness of seeing)
The Photograph gives a little truth, on condition that it parcels out the body. But this truth is not that of the individual, who remains irreducible; it is the truth of lineage (Roland Barthes, ‘Camera Lucida’; pp. 103).
