W3 - More Folio Thoughts, West Gate Freeway

How to document the West Gate Freeway/Ring Road:
I need to be driven or to choose one or more static points are accessible such as my 'beloved' Montague Street off ramp and the wonky arch!

Definitely multiple trips required for different light, traffic conditions, focuses in.
I need to consider each of these carefully.

And why do it at all?
The freeway is a place of many paradoxes.
I spend too much time on it so it's a site of my life's 'drama' and yet it's so ordinary.
It's a place where I glimpse astonishing things and where I sit trying not to be enraged!
It's a place of transition and yet I can go nowhere and I repeat this cycle endlessly.
It's a place where I meet so many people, without meeting them: where we constantly interact and yet don't.
It's a place I travel through, but never touch: that I see and don't see.

For Sociologist John Carroll it is a place of democracy and vital interaction that holds hope for meaning in a global desecularised world.

Some more thoughts on the myth of the car.

Provisional title: Such Things

Technique/Presentation: Re-photographing/booklet

I saw a little anonymous booklet (catalogue? free magazine?), with 'Mama' on the back cover, on a friend's table this week. Its direct theme was childhood, but its indirect themes were mother and absence. The artist had taken photos of photos and stills from film of himself as a child taken by his mother. The re-photographing is often of arrangements of these photos on walls or are presented in the booklet as blown up images that bleed to the edge of the page (unlike the originals) and, which, as a consequence, are blurry given the quality of the originals (rather like memory). There was some text I didn't have time to read but it seemed to be mostly documenting his memories of the taking of the original. The colouring of the package probably had the most effect on me - it evoked similar photos from my own childhood - sort of faded. The overall impact was melancholic - here he was so long along as viewed by another (with a loving eye that will never be repeated), but where was his mum?