Urbanautica

PAUL WALSH. THE SENSE OF WALKING

by Steve Bisson

«Walking taught me to be at ease in my own company, to understand myself, to conquer the fear of the unknown and gave me self confidence. The combination of walking and photographing taught me to analyse my surroundings and to try and understand my place in the world.»

Hi Paul, where did you grow up? What kind of place it was?

Paul Walsh (PW): Hey Steve, thanks for the invitation. I grew up in Birmingham, which is England's second city. As a place It was very much at the heart of the industrial revolution, and has been characterised by its mass of factories, canals and motorways. I grew up in the centre, an area close to what’s known as ‘Spaghetti Junction’ which is England's largest and most famous motorway junction. Salford Canal Junction is also underneath, which was a major artery for the canal boat trade in the 19th and early 20th century, and where many canals from around the country diverge. I mention this because these were the landscapes that shaped me when growing up, and when I first had the notion to be a photographer they were the places where I first made photographs. As a teenager I would explore the city via the canal routes that weaved throughout the city, hidden behind factories. For me these places were fascinating, and even now it’s probably the kind of landscape where I feel most at home.

About your education. You studied both in Brighton and Liverpool. Do you have any positive outcomes from your education? Is there a particular teacher that you would mention?

PW: Initially I studied painting and discovered photography as a way of documenting places for my paintings. I soon became obsessed with the photographic process, being out in the world, walking, exploring and meeting people, this was why I returned to education to study a degree in photography. During my degree, I had a lecturer called Gregg Leach, a fantastic colour documentary photographer. He introduced me to lots of photographers' work and helped me to talk about my own. He has a wonderful book called Twice Told Tales published by Dewi Lewis.

After this time I worked and traveled as a photographer for a number of years, but I began to feel lost with my practice. I didn’t really know what I wanted to say with photography, which is why I studied an MA in Brighton. It turned out to be one of the most challenging but rewarding experiences of my life. Throughout the two years, I discovered what was at the heart of my interest in photography, which is walking. I also met some very close colleagues with whom we went on to found the photography collective MAP6. We had many great lecturers such as Joanna Lowry, Fergus Heron and Mark Power. Mark has been one of my favourite photographers for many years and his work has been a big influence on me. His classes were always engaging and passionate and it was inspiring to listen to somebody who really knew about photography, from working within the industry at the highest level. An education in photography taught me to conceptualise, analyse and discuss photography, as well as to take criticism positively and offer constructive feedback. Critical and honest feedback can be hard to find, so I feel lucky to have kept close contact with my MAP6 peers.

Now about walking. I know you have a long term project exploring walking culture in the UK. Firstly what is leading you on this path, and what does "walking" mean to you?

PW: Growing up in the centre of a large industrial city, I was surrounded by buildings and pollution. My parents worked long hours and when we had a free weekend they would take me and my sisters walking to places such as the Peak District or Snowdonia. I associated walking with a sense of escape and contemplation, and it became natural for me to walk long distances. In later years I joined walking clubs and through travelling became interested in long distance hiking. Walking taught me to be at ease in my own company, to understand myself, to conquer the fear of the unknown and gave me self confidence. The combination of walking and photographing taught me to analyse my surroundings and to try and understand my place in the world.

During my studies, through writing my dissertation, I discovered a vast history of walking culture and craved to understand this through literature. Literature is my biggest influence as an artist, and I read to try and understand the complexities of walking. Amongst others, writers such as Charles Baudelaire, Guy Debord, Rebeca Solnit, Iain Sinclair and Robert Macfarlane were hugely influential on my way of thinking. I discovered that walking wasn’t just about getting between places or taking a pleasant walk in the countryside, but it could be about meditation, exploring memory, politics and history.

© Paul Walsh from the series 'Walking with Strangers'

With each project I work on I am trying to gain a further understanding of walking, and photographically I try to approach each series in a slightly different way. For example, I am currently working in Finland with The MAP6 Collective, where we are exploring themes surrounding the world happiness report. I am walking with people who live locally, but I am allowing them to guide me through a walk of their choice, whilst I record our conversations and document the walk photographically. It’s something I have never done before, and it opens up new photographic possibilities and enables me to think about walking as a shared experience.

Richard Long is often quoted as an artist when it comes to walking. There are many movements and practices in the arts that have adopted walking as a state of mind and a performative opportunity. What I like about your personal investigation is that it is rather more silent. It is more about understanding the very act of walking itself than leaving a trace.
For this reason, you walked along pilgrimage routes through France and Spain to experience the phenomenon of modern pilgrimage. Tell us more about your project 'Walking with Strangers’?

PW: I first walked the Camino de Santiago across Spain in 2001. I was invited by a friend and had never heard of it at the time. The walk ended up changing everything for me, my outlook on life, travel and my thoughts on photography. In 2017 I was going through some life changes and a window of opportunity opened up to do it again. This time I started by myself in Eastern France at Le Puy and ended up walking for three months to the West coast of Spain with just my tent, a few belongings and my camera. It was interesting to realise how little in life one actually needs to be happy.

© Paul Walsh from the series 'Walking with Strangers'

Whilst walking I met many interesting pilgrims who each had their unique reasons for undertaking the pilgrimage, many of which were getting over problems in their life. Some of their stories were heartbreaking. Walking seemed to help people to open up and the fact that I was a stranger meant that they would not feel judged. That feeling was reciprocated. Walking side by side also helps with talking as you are not sat opposite one another confrontationally. The physical act of walking also seems to create a fluid momentum for thinking and expressing thoughts through words. I would walk with people for a few days and then we would break off when it felt right. It was interesting to form intense relationships and then to let them go.

© Paul Walsh from the series 'Walking with Strangers'

Walking across France was mostly a solitary affair where I would often camp in the woods or fields. Once I crossed the Pyrenees into Spain I met many more people from all over the world, and was soon part of a group of nearly one hundred pilgrims that would meet each evening and remain in contact through a social media group. The Spanish part of the walk was very sociable, giving me plenty of opportunity to make portraits of people. I also tried to capture the places I walked through and somehow express the changes that were taking place within me as I walked on my own personal journey. Walking can be a transformative experience and I felt like a different person at the end of the 1700 miles. I believe that everybody should embark on a pilgrimage of some kind throughout their life. Because life is so busy we rarely get the time to truly know who we are and what we are capable of.

© Paul Walsh from the series 'Walking with Strangers'

The work of Richard Long has been highly influential on me, but his art seems to be about making an impermanent mark on the landscape, whereas I am interested in passing through the landscape and using that experience to communicate something about myself and the world.

© Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking', 1967

Thus observation. I feel like walking, especially when it comes "to fitting into a place", it favours identification in space, and predisposes the step of the heart to that of the body. This helps to see reality differently. With Towpath you chose to walk along England’s longest canal The Grand Union. What kind of London did you discover? And what about the waters that are almost indifferent to the destinies of the civilisation, which is reflected in it.

PW: I began Towpath just after my mother was diagnosed with a serious illness. I was travelling between London and Birmingham most weekends to visit my family, either on the train or along the motorway. I could see the Grand Union snaking its way beneath bridges below, and I was always curious to see what was happening down there. Out of curiosity, I started checking maps and saw that you could actually walk the entire way between London and Birmingham along towpaths. I decided to walk back home along the canal, as I felt that the walk would be some kind of gesture to my mother, and also a good opportunity to make photographs to help me come to terms with what I was feeling.

© Paul Walsh from the series 'Towpwath'

© Paul Walsh from the series 'Towpath'

Researching the canal I discovered that it was once considered the highway of England, before cars and motorways came along. I was fascinated by the history, and how in such a small space of time it had gone from being an important industrial waterway to becoming largely overlooked and overgrown. I started to draw a parallel between my mother’s decline in health and the physical and historical decline of the canal. In recent years the waterway has slowly been going through a process of regeneration and is being redefined as a green space, which I also linked to my mother's recovery.

© Paul Walsh from the series 'Towpath'

The canal towpaths in London and Birmingham were a unique way of exploring the city from within. Walking along these canals it felt like I got to experience the opposite side of the city, the backs of offices and housing estates, the places that I was not intended to see. I could hear people moving around above the towpath, over bridges and along busy streets, but for the most part, I couldn’t see them which created a strangely quiet atmosphere whilst walking through busy places. The surface of the canal water was also a source of photographic opportunity, offering a palette of unusual colours as oil mixed with water.

© Paul Walsh from the series 'Towpath'

It’s easy to take for granted the impermanence of cities such as London, however they are in a continual state of transformation. Take Birmingham for example, it has changed so rapidly and is continually in flux, it’s barely recognisable as the city I knew 20 years ago. The water became a metaphor for the continual flow of time amongst change, and a visual theme around which I could make photographs. Towpath became a photographic meditation on the inevitable transience of people, place and history. I have recently been considering doing the walk again, to see how much it has changed since my initial walk.

© Paul Walsh from the series 'Towpath'

The coast is a borderline place, between land and sea. At the same time, however, it depicts a dimension of passage, between different natural states. In this sense, the coast opens us up to different perspectives, it broadens our horizons, and perhaps our imagination. You have walked for a long time on the south coast of England. Tell us how you planned this journey?

PW: The south coast was like a far off, mythical place that I never knew. Like many photographers I’m often drawn to the exotic, to places I don’t understand. I felt this stretch of coastline would be an interesting place to make photographs and discover a side to my home country I had never seen. At the time I had enrolled on the MA at the University of Brighton. Part of the course requirements was that you needed to start a project that you could develop during the first year of the course. Along the Shoreline was my first long term project, and in making the work I discovered some of the fundamental interests I now have as a photographer.

I first researched the route I would walk, and due to the weather and public transport I decided to go from East to West. I then walked the coast in stages, sometimes for a week at a time, then return home to edit the images before going back to where I left off. I did this for over a year until I eventually reached the end of my route in West Cornwall.

© Paul Walsh from the series 'Shoreline'

The majority of images I made were a reflection of what I was feeling on the south coast. It can be a very melancholy place to be, the weather is often cold and overcast and it can invoke a sense of loneliness and isolation. I found these qualities evocative, and tried to make photographs that were an expression of my mood in as much as about the place. The southern shoreline is like an area between two worlds, the wild sublime vision of the sea, and the civilised towns and cities at the edge of land. I found this duality interesting to photograph, and it acted as a kind of backdrop on which to stage the simple happenings in my photographs. I was also interested in using the horizon to alter and complement the composition in each photograph. I remember reading how the coast has a strange connection with death and the unknown. All along my walk I would come across people quietly staring out towards the horizon into the blue abyss, it was captivating to see this unspoken connection between people and the sea.

© Paul Walsh from the series 'Shoreline'

As mentioned before the coast is an invitation to depart for new shores, but also a desire to resist and consolidate what you have. The coast is a sort of present compressed between past and future. What are your coasts talking about? And what did you learn about your country?

PW: The British coast is an interesting place to people watch, and from an anthropological point of view it could be rewarding to watch people on busy beaches. However, I wasn’t particularly interested in this side of the coast, I was more concerned with it being a place of contemplation and mental release, where your feelings could be dictated to some degree by the atmosphere, the landscape and the sense of place. Admittedly much of the south coast can appear saddening or in decline. I never really knew that places like that existed in England, and because they are against the backdrop of the sea they appear even starker then a run down neighbourhood in a city. On one hand you could be walking through a coastal resort that was run down, and within an hour you could be passing along a beach where people owned luxury yachts and live in large houses overlooking the sea. At times this disparity between rich and poor was very noticeable. In places such as Swanage, I really felt like I was walking in an England from 50 years ago, with sandcastles, deckchairs, and Punch and Judy shows. To some degree, you can get a real sense of what Englishness is from exploring the coast.

You are also a founding member of the photography collective MAP6. Could you briefly introduce the aim of the collective and tell us a bit more about its visual investigation and dissemination group methodology?

PW: MAP6 began when a number of us met whilst studying the MA Photography course at the University of Brighton. 6 of us formed a close bond and decided to exhibit together. Putting on a large show can be daunting, yet we found that we each had particular strengths to bring to the table. Over time we have each fitted into individual roles within the collective to do with web design, social media and marketing, travel logistics, writing, meeting organisation and curation. During each exhibition phase we split the work up between us.

Originally we started to draw common themes in our work but soon realised that we should make new work together. We decided that travelling somewhere to make work could add a sense of urgency and pressure to the process and contain the production of work within a strict time frame. We first went to Moscow as it was going through a lot of interesting changes at the time, plus it was a place neither of us had been before. Over 6 days we each came away with a small body of work which would be enough for an exhibition and a printed newspaper to disseminate the work. Only having 6 days really makes you push harder to get the images, because if you don’t you know you will be returning with nothing. Because we work closely together when away, there is a much more collaborative essence to the work. If for example, we encounter problems, artistically or logistically, then other members will help to find a solution. The experience of shooting and staying together in this way becomes like a long feedback session, where we are making images during the day and discussing them in the evening. Since Moscow, we have worked in Lithuania, Milton Keynes, Shetland, and we are currently making work in Finland.

© Paul Walsh from the series 'Moscow Circular'

Between photographing we have regular meetings to edit the work and to plan shows, talks and publications. Generally, we will try to have one intense shooting phase a year and one exhibiting phase and a number of feedback sessions. With each project, we try to use the images differently, from creating separate mini projects to bringing them together as a whole for a singular exhibit. Currently, we have 9 members, but we are always open to new members or guest collaborators if they fit in with our way of working. Ultimately the collective has become about making new work and finding ways to continually challenge ourselves both individually and as a collective, which is what keeps it interesting.

One of the latest works by MAP6 focuses on the Shetland Islands, a Scottish archipelago of over 100 islands, mostly uninhabited. Your series 'Far From the Centre of Things', was inspired by Hugh MacDiarmid’s writing during his time living in Shetland. Tell us more about this series. How long did your journey last and what message did you choose to convey with your project?

PW: I normally spend a couple of months gathering reading material before a MAP6 project, in order to find a subject. I came across the writing of Hugh MacDiarmid, and in particular his writing from Whalsay. I read his poem On a Raised Beach and began to imagine how this small island of Whalsay would look like, the more I imagined the more obsessive I became about visiting.

MacDiarmid headed to Shetland and retreated to the small island of Whalsay after his life fell apart in London. He spent 9 years living with his wife and children in an old fisherman's cottage, where he had one of the most creative periods of his career. It wasn’t an easy time for the writer as he felt cut off from the literary world and was an eccentric outsider on the island. He reached his own mental limits and eventually had a breakdown, but somehow found his own creative space and used his surroundings as inspiration.

© Paul Walsh from the series 'Far From the Centre of Things'

I used his story as a jumping off point and wanted to experience removing myself from the world. I was inspired by geographical isolation, as well as by the writer. I planned to visit his abandoned cottage where he lived, and walk around the island making photographs. I found a small cabin to stay in, and by cutting off from the world I was able to tap into that sense of aloneness and bring that into the photographs. During the day I would walk around the island meeting people and photographing the things I came across. Prior to my visit, I set up a meetings with people that enabled me to get in deeper and make portraits. At night I would venture out with my tripod and photograph the sky and coastline, and return back to the cabin after 4 am. Because of it being so northernly it was only dark for a few hours, but the light had its own unique quality. Island life was a totally new experience for somebody coming from a big city. Everybody knew each other, there were hardly any cars and there was no police. People were very open to me and excited about me being there. Prior to departure MAP6 had been on a local radio show, so people knew we were coming. I was asked if I was "one of the 6” on a number of occasions, and somebody even stopped to drive me around the island to show me a church and some local historical sights.

The final series was intended to be a description of a place, a homage to a great writer and a visual poem about losing oneself.

As a photographer, you divide your self between commissioned work and personal projects. Any suggestions for aspiring visual makers willing to approach a career?

PW: Making new work, finding commissions to earn a living, trying to get your work out into the world and remaining creative requires hard work and dedication. Finding a voice in photography also takes time, there can be a lot of self doubt along the way. So if students are considering a life in photography they must be prepared for the long haul, and to become obsessive about photography. The process of making money is not always easy and you must be willing to diversify to survive, but with each commission your practice and confidence will grow.

My best advice when starting out would be to get out into the world and make lots of work, it’s important to make images to help your vision become more acute, and with that again comes confidence. Learn to take criticism as something positive to draw from, it will help you to think about your work from the perspective of others, and you will learn how to defend your photography. And delve into the history of photography, read artist photobooks and try to locate where your own interests lie and where your practice fits in within the broader world of photography. I would also recommend building strong relationships with peers whilst studying, so you will have access to supportive advice as well as honest feedback.

You have worked in Africa as an expedition photographer for the NGO Raleigh international. What are the goals of NGO and how did you contribute through your work? Tell us more about "your Africa”.

PW: Raleigh is a sustainable development charity that works in remote areas to help protect vulnerable communities. Raleigh work with young volunteers from around the world to participate on projects such as building community toilet blocks, helping individuals to start their own business and sharing and teaching sustainable farming and reforestation techniques. My role as expedition photographer was to document the work of the charity for marketing campaigns, to help ensure they would receive further funding from a number of governmental institutions and private companies. I also worked on a number of stories for newspaper and magazine articles.

Travelling around Tanzania I would document projects, as well as present images to rural communities in order for them to understand the intentions of each project. Often communication would be limited and photographs are a fantastic way of demonstrating ideas and galvanising the community to help on projects. It’s important that there is a strong and clear relationship between the charity workers and the local villagers in order for the project to succeed. Photography is a way of helping people to bridge this gap so people can understand the long term intentions of each project and the charity.
“My Africa” was one filled with challenging but rewarding experiences. Each day when located village I would find myself confronted with challenges that I had never encountered before. For example one day I found myself ushered to a meeting in a neighbouring village. Upon arrival, I was pulled through a crowd of some 800 people to a stage where there was a heated discussion regarding local water rights and access to clean water. Completely unprepared, along with colleague and translator, we were thrust on stage and urged to explain to the crowd the intentions of the charity. I was then requested to photograph the event, as debates raged on between the officials and the crowd.

Tanzania is a beautiful country, with some of the kindest people I have met. I spent the majority of my time staying with families, which gave me a good insight into Tanzanian culture. Peaceful and open, Tanzania is one of the least politically problematic countries in Africa, but sadly one of the poorest. Through the help of Raleigh, it was wonderful to see people having the opportunity to open new businesses, plant their own forestry crops, or seeing children have access to clean and safe toilet facilities which in the long term saves lives.

Finally, what will be your next walk?

PW: Currently I am working on a new major project, exploring long distance walking culture along 10 of the UK’s national trails. Prior to COVID-19 I had completed 2 long distance trails, and was hoping to walk at least two more by the end of the year. That will have to remain on hold, but suffice to say I am itching to get walking again

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LINKS
Paul Walsh personal website

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A Point in Time
Paul Walsh

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MAP6 COLLECTIVE. ON HAPPINESS AND ISOLATION