Ise Does It - Day -1
03.11.24
A warmup of another kind today: I joined Aidan for a 10km walk through the fields to the north east of his house. This is the first walk of any length I’ve done in a long time, the first that might be considered some kind of preparation for the series of long walks I’m about to do, and I’m doing it just two days before those walks start in earnest.
The reality is: I don’t really like walking. I was not born a walker and it remains to be seen whether I’ll die one.
More precisely, I don’t like walking as a means of everyday transportation. Give me the choice between driving and walking and I’ll default to taking the car. I know I know.
I will make a begrudging exception to walk to the local Aldi and the gym, but that’s only because they’re less than 10 minutes from the front door and to drive there regularly would be an ostentation too far even for me.
Occasionally, I’ll also walk the 30 minutes to my office desk in Summer Hill rather than taking my bike because I think to myself “Someday I’ll do another walk like the Camino” and it probably makes sense to make sure that my legs still, you know, work.
Maybe I simply don’t like walking in Sydney. I think it comes down to the tyranny of distance and the density of difference.
For a start, it’s a city that is largely defined by its suburbs: there’s just not a lot to see beyond the various genre of house that define the city’s different eras of expansion and the strips of shops that sit between them, typically on inhospitable arterial roads. Warren Kirk, an Aussie photographer, has made photographing the decay of certain kind of Melbournian suburbia a thing, but my eye — or perhaps my heart — is not yet there 1.
Walking the streets of suburban Sydney, you’re typically at some remove from the houses, many kept as they are behind fence, hedge and lawn. Or, if I’m walking through Sydney’s older, inner-city suburbs, full of terrace houses where the front door opens almost straight on to the street, there’s not so much room for human interest to emerge between me and the camera. And if I think of myself as any kind of photographer, then it’s as a photographer of life rather than architecture so I live for the signs of life that are so often hidden away.
It’s the same with our shopfronts, too: they’re typically hard-up on the foot path and it can be hard for me to frame an interesting image without standing in the middle of a busy road, even with a 28mm equivalent lens.
Also, I have a mind like a blackbird: I’m always looking for the next thing, the next quirk to catch my eye and capture on camera. Once I’ve walked past a dozen neatly kept Californian Bungalows, 60s suburban moderns, or twee inner-city terraces, I’m craving something — anything — to break the monotony.
I’ll be happy to prove myself wrong with all of this. It makes my teeth itch to publicaly admit that I don’t find my home city particularly interesting from a creative point of view and I really would like to. At the very least it’d be cheaper to walk around Sydney camera in hand than to fly to Japan. And I wouldn’t feel like an insufferable snob.
It was walking around Paris in 2002 with a Nikon CoolPix 950 that sparked my adult interest in photography. This weird device was split down the middle with a screen on one side of the a pivot and the lens and sensor array on the other. It was small, discrete, and by virtue of that pivot, I could contort the camera and compose images in ways that felt entirely novel back then2.
But beyond the tool, what made Paris so great for finding photography was the opposite of what makes Sydney so challenging: walk 50 metres — 5 even — and there’ll be something surprising to see. It’s that density of difference thing and in a city like Paris, walking is a fine way to engage with the viscera of the place, to connect with its energy and try and make some sense of it, especially with a camera in hand to slow me down and make me really look.
And so back to this morning’s warmup walk. It was a reminder of what made the Camino such an amazing creative opportunity and a meditative one.
When I walk across country, hives of visual activity and subjects of interest — houses, farm buildings, villages — are interspersed with a whole lotta trees, fields, and flowers. I pendulate between intense noticing and image making — me, photographer, they, them, it, subject — and simply being a part of the landscape. Call, response. Catch, release. Inhale and exhale. Peace descends as I begin to move between each state and with each bit of noticing and the time for reflection that follows my cup slowly refills.
I’ve been warming up to something else today, too: I’ll be damned if I don’t hit 1,000 words by the time tonight is done and I lay my futon out on the living room floor. From here on out I’ll be writing a 1,000 words every night for the following 10. At least that’s the hope.
Tomorrow is Day 0. It’ll start, after breakfast, with the 9:15 Tokiwa service from Ishioka to Tokyo Station, where I’ll meet my walking partner Kalia. And from there, the Shinkansen to Nagoya, and then the Kintetsu Limited Express to Iseshi where I’ll stop at an outdoors store for some walking poles. Because I have not trained and I’ll need all the help I can get.
Until tomorrow!
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There’s a project brewing here, however. There’s a lot to be said for the Greek and Italian houses that are fast disappearing from Sydney’s Inner West. ↩
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While the camera still lives at my parent’s house, all the images I took with it disappeared in 2011 when my laptop and backup hard drive were stolen :( ↩