A Sense of Place ...
- Chris Hilton
- Aug 26, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 18, 2025
Or, how to capture the 'essence' of a place within a single image.
It's the big competition coming up at the club this season.
And just to make it even more feindish we're asking you to present it as a photocollage!
More on that later, but for now, lets treat it as two seperate subjects and get to grips with A Sense of Place ...
The first thing to say is that there is no definitive answer to the question 'What is a sense of place?'
What I consider to be the 'nitty gritty' or the kernel of truth that describes a place like Bridport (for arguments sake) will, very likely, be different to yours ... and different, again, from the viewer.
That said, it's an age old quest; poets, writers, artists, reporters, photojournalists and a whole host of others are, forever, trying to sum up a place in as succint a way as possible.
In our world, it is probably the travel photographer that obsesses with this conundrum the most ... and the simplest tool in the box is to use the wide shot. If you look at the winners from the Wanderlust Travel Photo of the Year; you see that the images are not just about the subject. There is enough 'stuff' around the subject for you to see how the subject interacts or sits within its environment ... if it's a picture of a person, then all that extra visual information makes, what is known as, as an environmental portrait. It is the 'stuff' that roots that person to a place ... the thing that gives the image 'A Sense of Place'.
There are other tools in the box, using an iconic land mark in the back ground can root an image in a place. Such as this view over the Paris rooftops by Brassai ...
This image is taken from a book I have about the Hungarian/French photographer ... the Eiffel Tower in the background gives us a very clear sense that the image is taken in Paris (infact it is a view taken from the window of Picasso's studio on the Rue Boetie) ... part of a large body of work that lead to a 1964 book Conversations with Picasso.
During the dark days of the Covid lockdowns and our banishment to the world of zoom; the camera club was able to attract speakers from far and wide. One such speaker was the French street photographer Valerie Jardin who spoke to us from New York. She said that one of the ways she roots her images in a place is to include a flag in some of the images. She showed us some fantastic examples but a quick flip through her website didn't turn up any! However, this series by Valerie uses car details to give us a sense of place.
The search for a good 'flag' image lead me to another book ... On the Road, which has this fantastic image by Claudia Daut. Not only does it have the Cuban flags, but an instantly recognisable image of Che Guevara that gives us an incredibly strong sense of place.
And yet it doesn't have to be about the iconic ... writers and photographic artists have employed what I would call the 'A to B' aproach ... you take two arbitary points and travel between them, describing what you see along the way. I guess the most recognisable (but not necesssarily the one with the greatest artistic intent) would be Micheal Palin's 'Pole to Pole'. He followed as straight a line as possible in order to create a snapshot of the Earth. The programmes themselves weren't about icons, they were about people, clothes, uniforms, food, architecture, landscape, weather, modes of transport, customs, tradition, habits, culture, art, religion ... there are a myriad of ways to record a sense of place ... it doesn't have to be grandiose, it could just be a piece of cheese!
It's a personality flaw, I know ... that whever I try to explain anything as clearly as possible, I usually end up creating more questions than I answer ... but you're in luck. We have a discussion group coming up where you can pose your questions.
There will be grown ups in attendance that will be able to make sense of your sense of place queries ... please register so we have an idea of numbers (and therefore an appropriate venue) ... you know it makes sense ...
