In preparation for the Nepal Trek, I'm practising walking and creating, to get both my physical and photographic fittness up to speed. So I set myself a little exercise at lunchtime on Thursday, where I decided to focus on "Seeing Red"... I parked at Broadway and walked to Chinatown - it's a short walk, but filled with photographic possibilities... The 'Red' thing was recalling an old Artschool exercise, of defining a set of parameters before going out with a camera, placing limits on what you will focus on, to narrow down the seemingly endless possibilities when one sets out to 'create' in response to an environment. It was also interesting to me what a perceptive shift occurred in 'deciding to see red', because all at once, my awareness was heightened to things I had not noticed before, details I might have passed over in a blurr suddenly came into sharp relief. I noticed how much effort lots of people had gone to with their outfits, how they had sought to co-ordinate their accessories, and what that might say about their lives and dreams and aspirations - and even on a grander scale, how the whole city seemed to hum with this resonance of appreciated Redness, how there's a shared aesthetic that unconsciously arises within a culture. I guess we don't always 'see' the creation of that in our own culture, but it's part of what's so appealing about travel, that we bring fresh eyes to appreciate the rhythms and aesthetics of the places and people that we visit...
