I Wander
2017
3 Photographic Prints
7 in. x 7 in.
“Not to find one’s way in a city may well be banal and uninteresting. It requires ignorance—nothing more,” says the twentieth century philosopher-essayist Water Benjamin. “But to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest—that calls for quite a different schooling.” To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost, but loses oneself, with the implication that this is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.”
Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. New York: Penguin Group, 2005. 6.
This passage really resonated with me as soon as I read it, and some of the keywords that stood out for me in this passage are “surrender”, “fade away”, “uncertainty and mystery” and “geography”. As someone who is terrible with geography and could easily (read: does) get lost in the city, with maps on her phone and written directions in her notebook, this passage instinctively made me think of what “getting lost” means to me, and how I could manage to do that with my awful sense of direction. Personally, based on widespread psychological studies related to the affects of modernization—anxiety being one of many—I don’t think that many people in the present age would feel comfortable “getting lost” in the way Solnit describes it, without being at least a little familiar with their surroundings, and being reassured of finding their way back home. Being one of those people, and having been in Toronto for a few years now, it has been impossible for me to look past the looming presence of the CN Tower everywhere I go, and somewhere between excitedly looking up to the tower form the perspective of the tourist and getting utterly annoyed with my vision of Toronto’s skyline constantly being blocked by the monstrosity, the CN Tower has become a part of my mental map of Toronto; its familiarity a balm to my anxiety as I roam about streets I have never seen before and places way outside of my general area of understanding. The CN Tower has moved on from being just another global landmark to a personal landmark, where the sole presence of it—be it closer to me or far away in the distance—has made it easier for me to get lost without constantly being plagued by the idea of being lost, and it helps me surrender myself to a site that makes me aware of its unfamiliarity. This familiarity quite literally fades my panic away, to allow me to give the surrounding landscape my undivided attention. Like Solnit explicitly points out the difference between "being lost" and "losing oneself", the CN tower isn’t a landmark used for comprehending direction, but simply for easing my sense of fright.
In terms of the visual aesthetics, I wanted the photographs to be fairly “everyday,” for every single day is battle with anxiety in an unfamiliar surrounding. Even though the sites—focusing around St. George St., Spadina, and College St. in Toronto—are extremely familiar to me now, there have been a number of times where I have managed to lose my way around classes and buildings in search of new shortcuts, cafeterias, and restaurants. The images have been taken on an iPhone camera, to go along with the idea of the “everyday”, without post-production editing. Having chosen to take these photographs on a foggy day, the images seem to literally mimic the idea of “fading out".