Mick Hartley

I browsed this photography book yesterday in the Tate Modern bookshop – The Walk: August Eriksson. Lovely photos:

[Photos © August Eriksson]

It took me a while to work out that this walk wasn't in Eriksson's native Sweden at all, but was in fact in Japan: Kumano Kodō, to be precise – a series of ancient pilgrimage routes. That's because the actual location of the walk is not – as you might naively think – of any significance whatsoever. It's all about the philosophy:

The Walk entails a tension, indeed a paradox, between the subject and the medium. The subject, the walk, is about process, physical movement, step after step further along the path; while the medium, the photograph, is an arrested moment of seeing. August Eriksson captures the corporeal movement by seriality and repetition. Sixty-six images follow one after another, all with the same strict composition: the path, seen from the eye level of the walker, disappears into the vanishing point of the image. The images urges me on to browse further, to continue moving from spread to spread, following along in the repetition and variation in the images.

It can't be long before your neighbour's holiday snaps will be similarly presented….

"I was trying to emphasise the paradoxical nature of the photography of tourism, whereby the actual flowing physical corporality of the holiday is broken up into frozen serial moments in time, with Debbie and the children pictured by the hotel swimming pool in brief staccato tableaux, interspersed with seemingly random images in a restaurant, or in front of a church, or on a boat, in which you the viewer are tantalisingly there-yet-not-there - Heidegger's famous da-aber-nicht-da, which captures so perfectly the modern existential dilemma of the tourist – from which a narrative may be constructed, captured somehow by the very seriality and repetition of the pictures, which, inevitably I think, compels further exploration…"

"Yes, well, I'm not sure about that Brian. Good lord, is that the time? We'll have to be getting back I'm afraid…."