A Pink Balloon ... discussing a sense of place
- Chris Hilton
- Jan 18, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: Nov 23, 2025
We met at the Town Hall to discuss a sense of place ... we started of with a complicated graphic but, over the course of the evening, boiled it down to quite a simple statement.
For a photograph to have A Sense of Place it has to convey what it 'feels' like to be there ... but you don't necessarily need to know where 'there' is ...
Essentially, we decided that, in photography terms, this diagram provides examples of 'hooks' that help to convey a sense of place.
If your photograph includes landmarks (or representatations of them), icons, cliches, habitats, typography etc etc, they are clues ... little 'hooks' in the background (not the main event) that add to a sense of place.
We discussed a wealth of photographers that used some of these techniques. We looked at two photographers, famous for shooting Kodachrome 64 (surely the only film to have a song penned about it, written by Paul Simon and performed here by the Muppets), a very slow slide film originally devolped for landscape work but beloved of a select few for its fine grain and rich colours.
Fred Herzog who shot two or three rolls a week for five decades in Vancouver and Raghubir Singh who searched for the lyrical poetry inherant in the life of India ...
We looked at the work of Bill Brandt, particularly his images of the industrial North ... and when you look at these, remember that statement we came to ... A Sense of Place lets you know what it 'feels' like to be in a place.
Phil Penman's images of New York leave you in know doubt that you're in a North American city, even if you don't know New York. His lockdown project not only conveys a sense of place but the images also let you feel what it was like to experience that sense of seperation and 'other wordliness' that consumed everything at the time.
We looked at Giacomo Brunelli's photographs of New York, London and Venice, the images of Venice give a strong sense of place with only the smallest (and often out of focus) of hooks ...
Bearing in mind we are looking at a sense of place for a forthcoming competition where we will be presenting as a photocollage, we looked at the work of the Icelandic artist Charlotta María Hauksdóttir whose fragmented landscapes are mulitilayered, both metaphorically and and literally as they are cposites of different images and materials.
As I was introducing the work of some French photographer Aget, Brassai and Doisneau; I was suddenly distracted by a pink balloon that I noticed hung on up on the lighting track, high up in the Town Hall ... it reminded me of the French film Le Ballon Rouge and the wonderful sense of place it has as the little boy charges around the, now flattened, district of Belleville in Paris with a sentient red balloon. It's worth half an hour of your time just to view those streets ... and the final scene reminded me of the indomitable Lawnchair Larry, an honourable mention in the Darwin Awards.
Back in 1982 he decided he'd quite like to hover above his backyard for an afternoon so he attached 45 weather balloons to a garden chair, got on with some sandwiches and a beer, then his friends cut the tehering rope and instead of hovering above the yard, Larry was propelled into the main flightpath for Los Angeles International Airport! What a guy!
Read more about a sense of place here ...
Next up ...
