Airport Walks
An exploration of the walking-photography interstice
This is a text I read at the Walking Further track of the Royal Geographical Society annual meeting in London, September 2024. It is a condensed version of a longer paper that is awaiting publication.
“I’m a PhD researcher at Newrope, the Chair for Architecture and Urban Transformation at ETH Zürich. My work centers on the development of what I call a practice of imagination around the datum of a former mining site in Belgium. However, the work that I’m presenting here is not connected to my academic research but is an integral part of my photography practice. I have been involved in photography for over 20 years. The pedestrian element has always been an important part of that.
The project that I’m presenting here encompasses nine walks from major airport hubs in Europe to the centre of the associated city. The walks started at the following airports: Brussels, Amsterdam, London, Stockholm, Rome, Athens, Frankfurt, Paris and Zurich. This project unfolded over many years. Initially I wanted to orient my paper to discussing the spatial typology of the airport-urban interstice. Because there is an interesting pattern to be detected in these edgelands. All this is valuable fodder for designerly explorations but that’s not what I’d like to discuss at present.
Walking to photograph
In my paper I focus on another interstice. I wanted to explore what the relationship was between the walking and the photographing. At first sight that relationship is quite clear as the photographic impulse decisively and pragmatically shaped the project as a whole and the individual walks. I chose airports in different countries that were a considerable distance from the city so as to offer opportunities to gather an ‘interesting’ photographic portfolio. The distances covered varied between 15 and 35 km. All walks were done in a single day. None of the walks were planned ahead. I did not follow gpx-trails but relied on cursory study of online maps in advance of the walk, on a general sense of direction, ad hoc inspection of Google Maps while walking and on my intuition in situ. It would have been impossible anyhow to stick to a narrow script as I had no idea where I would be able to leave the airport complex. Furthermore, I wanted to be able at all times to give in to my photographic curiosity and so did not want to be constrained by a pre-cooked route. And risk factors like intense traffic or stray dogs would sometimes force me to abandon a logical or attractive route to the city and improvise. Also, I walked alone. Few people see the attractiveness of an ‘airport walk’ anyhow. But the main reason for the solo character is the fact that presence of other human beings lessens the focus of the photographic gaze.
So, the way in which I’m presenting the practical conception of the walks here make it appear as if they were strictly subservient to an artistic project. I walked to be able to produce a collection of photographs. I needed my legs only as a carrier for my roving photographic eye. In arguing for walking as a distinct artistic medium Blake Morris distinguishes between “works that must be experienced as a walk from works that use walking as a process or technique to create art in other media.” [1] The airport walks seem to fall quite unambiguously in the latter category. However, I sensed that this initial assessment may be somewhat shallow, and I wanted to seek confirmation by exploring the nature of the photographic project, along with my intentions and experiences in itinere.
Street photography
I took three different angles on this question. The first was to frame the project as ‘street photography’. After all, when you walk from airports to city centres, you spend most of your time on the streets in a predominantly urban or suburban setting. Beyond the consensus that street photography is characterized by its focus on human presence, its candid nature, and its occurrence in public spaces, it is a complex phenomenon that has evolved over more than a century. In elucidating the link between walking and photographing from a street perspective, I found out that it matters what kind of narrative that one adheres to. There is a very dominant narrative that foregrounds street photography as a quintessential expression of modernism. This prioritises abstraction and interiority over narration and performance. [2]
On the other hand the photographers themselves saw their physical locomotion as essential to their skill. They saw themselves as hunters or predators, relying on nimble athleticism to blend unseen into the heart of the unfolding action. Henri Cartier-Bresson said: “I roamed the streets all day, feeling very tense and ready to pounce, determined to ‘catch’ life — to preserve life in the act of living.” He would probably have agreed with the phenomenologically inflected definition of street photography as “a way of walking through a space while being constantly aware of how one can arrange and frame compositional elements in advance of a yet-to-be-seen sequence of events that may or may not happen”. [3] Here the tables are turned. Walking is framed as an integral part of the artistic process. Street photography is understood first and foremost as a complex sensorimotor pattern, of which pressing the shutter button is an integral part. It’s the movement that counts; the artefact that ultimately results is secondary.
In my paper I develop this reflection further by exploring the resonance between the drifting of the street photographer and Tim Ingold’s conception of wayfinding, but I won’t dwell on that here.
Landscape photography
In my second approach to the question of the relationship between walking and photographing in my Airport Walks project I am taking the angle of landscape photography. Indeed the project was conceived in 2015 on a ride with the Leonardo Express train that connects Fiumicino airport to the city of Rome. My eye, turned towards the outer world, was the eye of a landscape photographer rather than that of a street photographer. The ugliness of these dross-scapes triggered an odd mix of elation and grief. I wanted to immerse myself in this strange territory.
Stylistically and philosophically, this links my project to an originally American aesthetic movement that emerged in the mid-1970s and was labelled New Topographics. [4] These were American landscape photographers — Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Frank Gohlke and others — who turned away from the romantic sensibilities of Ansel Adams’s landscape photography to focus on the mundane realities of rapidly expanding industrial, infrastructural and suburban landscapes. In my paper I am discussing this particular sensibility more deeply.
Here I want to zoom in on the question: were the New Topographics photographers walkers? I haven’t found any evidence of this. But maybe it’s not the actual activity of walking that is important here, but the artist’s spirit of “getting there and being there”. In a survey of early 21st century photographic projects that document the effects of boom-and-bust economic cycles on the Irish landscape, Colin Graham acknowledges these projects’ indebtedness to the New Topographics [5]. What is characteristic for these efforts, he says, “is that they offer to turn the landscape human by being a photograph — that is, by getting there and being there. By being the evidence of a journey to a non-place, where a camera is set up, they constitute a further record, not of the place but of the effort to get there, the decision to notice this nothingness.” Graham sees in this desire to foreground the photograph as record of a critical and actual geographical journey echoes of “that Situationist conceptual byway known as psychogeography”. New Topographics-style photography and psychogeography inhabit the same conceptual territory in that they deploy a phenomenology of travel and suggest “the physicality of standing in one place as an antidote to the inhuman non-place. (…) we should remember, in looking at this kind of landscape photography, that it is a form of critique that, as well as being visual, is editorial (that is, it involves a choice to photograph this) and perambulatory. The journey to get there is implicit in the image. If we forget the journey we lose part of the impact which the image can have.”
Psychic photography
A third perspective is offered by what I label in the paper as psychic photography. Here I am connecting back to that feeling experienced on the train in Rome, of grief and elation. This puzzling combination of repulsion and attraction has been avidly explored through the trope of the uncanny. In common parlance, a setting or situation described as uncanny is experienced as something unsettling, mysterious and possibly unsafe. Conceptually Freud’s 1919 essay on the uncanny as the feeling that accompanies something repressed coming to the surface, has been most influential.
In my paper I’m returning to my own past and the childscape in which I spent my youth. I evoke the womblike feeling of the spaces in which I grew up — particularly the dead-end street where my grandmother lived and the village beyond. Remarkably, my safe space was bounded and intersected by three parallel east-west transit axes: a national road to the south, the railway line in the middle and, to the north, the intangible demarcation provided by the approach path for commercial aircraft to Brussels National Airport.
My relationship with these infrastructural boundary markers of the familiar was one of ambivalence. They stood for both promise and risks. As a young boy, I loved all forms of motorised transport, and trains and aeroplanes in particular filled my youthful imagination with the scent of adventure. And so the more or less constant presence of airplanes, casually floating just a few hundreds of meters above the ground along the southern perimeter of my childscape, was a reassuring presence. Yet at the same time there was an unshakable alienness associated with it. it was a hard barrier that, psychogeographically speaking, created distinct territories. The world beyond the line felt vaguely threatening and I literally never ventured beyond it. I preferred to behave as if it did not exist in an attempt to conjure the secrets it might harbour. (Interestingly, the hamlet beyond the flight path was called ‘Delle’, which in the local dialect is indistinguishable from ‘hell’.) But, whether I liked it or not, every plane that I saw leisurely settling into its approach to the runway was also a marker of that foreigness. Every plane was a micro-jolt to my existential security, was a parasite in the low hum of my juvenile body. In fact, every airliner made me subliminally aware of the co-existence of two bodies, a body that I considered personal and familiar, and that phantasised about a career as an airliner pilot, and a ‘prepersonal’, anonymous, wild being that sensed and acknowledged its otherness. The gap between these two opened up the experience of uncanniness.
I might see my airport walks as a kind of ritualised reenactment of that youthful micro-trauma. A kind of ‘edgework’ [6], a form of risk-taking behaviour, a voluntary exploration of the terminator line between order and chaos, of “the difference between our lived experiences, our recollected experiences, and the wilderness underlying those experiences.” [7] What kind of photography aligns with this edgework? Psychic photography, maybe. Not to confirm the primacy of cognition, but to express a way of photographing that probes into archetypal patterns, into history, into what James Hillman called “the Great Repressed”. The irony of my airport walks is that this kind of soul work is animated by what Marc Augé foregrounds as “non-place”: the airport terminal, the surveillance zones with its regimented and anonymous flows, the secondary dross of white boxes, parking lots and barracks, the ephemeral green belts, the faceless suburban fabric, the gentrified inner city.
This exploration of the relationship between walking and photography is not conclusive. What is certain is that the a priori framing of walking as subordinate to the artistic process does not do justice to the complex relationships between the two. The sequential and speculative framing of these airport walks as an engagement with street photography, landscape photography and what I have tentatively labelled ‘psychic photography’ reveals a complex interdependence between physical presence, bodily locomotion, emotional reflexivity and imaging. Walking and photographing become inseparable, part of a more fundamental process of existential positioning, memory and identity formation.
[1] Morris, B. (2020). Walking networks: The development of an artistic medium. Rowman and Littlefield.
[2] Schwartz, S. (2021). Street photography reframed. Arts, 10(2), 29. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts10020029
[3] LensCulture. (2019). LensCulture guide to street photography.
[4] Cheng, W. (2011). “New Topographics”: Locating epistemological concerns in the American landscape. American Quarterly, 63(1), 151–162.
[5] Graham, C. (2014). “Motionless monotony”: New nowheres in Irish photography. Revue LISA, 12(3). Retrieved from https://journals.openedition.org/lisa/5963 [Accessed 30 July 2024]. https://doi.org/10.4000/lisa.5963
[6] Lyng, S. (2005). Edgework: The sociology of risk taking. Routledge.
[7] Trigg, D. (2012). The memory of place: A phenomenology of the uncanny. Ohio University Press.
