Les ocres de Roussillon

Roussillon is famous for its red and ocher rocks which have been used for making pigments for centuries. Our walk took us along the sentier des ochres (first three pictures), then to the old  town of Roussillon where, not surprisingly, most buildings were painted in reds and ochres.

There is also a place they call Colorado de Rustrel – a bit off Roussillon so it was not really part of the walk (but it fits into this post’s theme, pictures five and six).

However, l’usine d’ocre Mathieu (Mathieu’s ochre factory) is so close to Roussillon’s town centre that it can be visited on foot (last three pictures).

… if you enjoyed this walk, make sure to visit Jo’s Monday Walks for stories from all around our world.

Home Range (I)

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My favourite walk, and a great place to smooth the creases out of my soul, as a German poet (almost) put it: This is an area where I do not feel there is a thing like poor weather; and so this walk in the fog was extremely nice. As for the route, there is none, especially when I bring my camera. I just roam about which much to everybody’s delight leads to bringing home loads of mud on my shoes… Maybe this ‘method’ has to do with what Robert Adams writes about the relation between photographers and dogs:

“My guess […] is that what sustained the artists’ affection for dogs was above all the animals’ enlivening sense of possibility. Artists live by curiosity and enthusiasm, qualities readily evident as inspiration in dogs. Propose a dog a walk and its response is absolutely yes. As a terrier of ours once exclaimed to Kerstin, in a dream of hers, ‘Let’s, Kerstin!’ Those were the only words that anyone had ever heard a dog speak – a wide-open program of unqualified eagerness, delivered from her characteristic posture of readiness to bolt for the kitchen, town, or filed.” (Robert Adams, Why People Photograph, New York: Aperture, 1994. p. 47)

In the end I should not forget to mention Jo’s Monday Walk, because if you like walking as much as I do, that’s a great place to visit and get inspired and participate.

Landscapes and Maps

Looking at a countryside horizontally, you see what would be represented in your classic landscape picture. If you tilt your view by 90° and look straight down, what you see is something that could be appropriately represented in a map – except for the scale of course. Scale and detail would rather be a matter of distance from the ground then.

There are several examples for this kind of perpendicular view in this blog, and the feature these pictures share is a reduction in or even absence of perspective.

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Further Reading

Gottfried Boehm, “Offene Horizonte”, Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen. Berlin: Berlin UP, 2007.