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IT’S JUST A MATTER OF TIME
Toby Blackman

Hunter’s Path, Exeter, UK






It’s Just a Matter of Time - PDF




‘The site written through this work is formed in the space and time produced outward of two photographs taken on the Hunter’s Path in Dartmoor, Exeter.

Set in immaculate formal gardens and overlooking the Teign Gorge, Castle Drogo was designed by Edwin Lutyens for Julius Drewe and built between 1911 and 1930. I visited Castle Drogo for the first time on 14 September 2019. I was on my way to visit my mum on the weekend of her seventy-first birthday. She had suffered a massive stroke earlier in the year and remained hospitalised in Truro, Cornwall. I took a break from the long, hot drive from Nottingham and walked on to the Teign Gorge ‘classic circuit,’ a circular path which joins a singletrack trail, the Hunter’s Path, and descends to the floor of the Gorge. I carried my medium format film camera aroundmy neck and stopped to take two shots on a bend on the Hunter’s Path, simply – it would seem – to be present and active in a place.

It was the last weekend I would see my mum.

This work acts upon the ‘autotheoretical impulse’ (Fournier 2021) to write the photographic site through explicitly subjective autobiography, description, and discourse. The history, events, patterns and condition of the physical body – mother, and son – form situated knowledges (Haraway 1988) at an intersection in the literature of Barthes (1980), Phelan (1991), Dillon (2006), Nelson (2015) and Fournier (2021), with Berger (2013), Sontag (1977), Borden (2007) and Burgin (1996, 2018). Gaps are formed between photographic discourse, the body and the page, creating an ‘inner space of language’ between the signifier and the signified (Genette 1966). This work writes site in these gaps as mnemonic spaces embodied over time to offer an autotheory of and for photography.’

Toby Blackman
 

 

Echoes and Intersections is a collection of site-writings produced as part of the module Critical Spatial Practice: Site-Writing across the MA Architectural History, MA Situated Practice, and MA Historic Urban Environments dgree and PhD programmes at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

The featured works take the reader through fixed spatial locations and buildings, and on temporal journeys across ambiguous lands and waters. Written simultaneously across the globe, our situated writing offers diverse perspectives and narratives on plural geographies, landscapes and cities, through pieces interwoven with multiple, intersecting threads.

Many of the works occupy edgelands, peripheries or crossing points, writing the boundaries of buildings, states or bodies. They explore homelands, homes and selves that have been deconstructed, revealed and returned to. Echoing with memories, histories and absent others, the sites written carry the voices of place and voices displaced or fragmented, which resonate through the materials of the land - mud, sand, sky and rock.

These writings can be read in any order, allowing connections to emerge differently upon each reading.

Curatorial committee: Toby Blackman, Chia-Ying Chao, Kanza Leghari, Charlotte Morgan & Rasha Saffarini. 

With thanks to Polly Gould, Jane Rendell and David Roberts.


Bloomsbury Festival 2021

In October 2021, participants from the class read from their work on Bloomsbury Radio as part of Bloomsbury Festival 2021, alongside Polly Gould, Jane Rendell, David Roberts and participants from the class of 2020.

Find the recordings on Soundcloud here.