Meuse Source number 1
When you say that you are going to make a travel, the
first question always is: where are you going to? The question seems obvious,
but is it really so? I mean, of course, we have to go somewhere when travelling,
but is it a matter of fact that the destination is its most important aspect?
Is it so that a travel is intrinsically unsuccessful when we don’t reach our
destination, i.e. the geographical purpose or purposes of our trip? That we
must say that we don’t have made a travel, if we hadn’t at least planned to reach
a certain location, even if we don’t reach it for one reason or another?
Although I must go somewhere when making a travel (not
counting a travel in my mind), I think that it is quite well possible to go on
a trip in which the geographical destination is a redundant aspect. In the
Netherlands, the summer this year is rainy and cool. It’s not the type of
weather that you would like to go to the beach and take a sunbath. So,
sun-worshippers want to go away, to the south, where it is warm and sunny and
where you can sunbathe when you like. At present, the Dutch newspapers are full
of advertisements with travels to the beaches of Spain, Greece, Turkey or
Gambia or wherever they have warm sunny beaches. But is it really important for
our sun-worshippers to which of these countries they’ll go? I think it isn’t.
What counts is whether there is a good beach, whether the weather is good, the
price of the trip and maybe a few things more, but the geographical destination
is secondary for most people. They simply want to sunbathe and that’s the
actual purpose of the trip.
Or to take another instance, my wife and I just
returned from Northeastern France, where we followed the River Meuse from Sedan
till its sources. Once we had seen the sources, we directly drove home. Does
this mean that the Meuse sources were the destination and primary purpose of
our trip? That the first question to ask about our travel is “Where have you
been?” with a “to the Meuse sources” as its obvious reply? No, for what we
really have done there is making photos of towns and villages on the Meuse with
a pinhole camera. We had allotted two weeks for the project, and when we
wouldn’t have reached the sources of the river, we still would have made a lot
of pinhole pictures and we might go there later again for doing the last part
of the river. Moreover, my actual project is not so much taking pinhole photos
of towns and villages on the Meuse, but making such photos along any river. Since
such a purpose is too abstract, this time I had chosen the Meuse in France as
the river and then its sources as the logical final destination of the present trip.
So we can say that travelling along the Meuse was the secondary destination of
our trip and seeing its sources the tertiary destination. The purpose of the
trip or, if you like, its primary destination, was taking pinhole photos of
towns and villages on a river, in this case on the Meuse.
The upshot is: There are many ways to travel. Travelling
to a geographical destination is only one way, and often this aim is secondary
at most.
For some of my photos with my pinhole camera of river
towns and villages see http://www.flickr.com/photos/photographybytheway/sets/72157619959769582/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/photographybytheway/sets/72157625378290041/
No comments:
Post a Comment