How I See It — My Place

An Exhibit of Photographs and Writing by California Teens

The Magic of the Mundane

By Claude Willey

The idea that our immediate surroundings are worth a second look, let alone thoughtful study and examination, seems in some ways as radical today as it did over 50 years ago, when the pioneer of cultural landscape study, the late John Brinckerhoff Jackson, challenged the field of human geography by proclaiming that the search for the meaning of place needed to shift away from the examination of formal, enclosed, or designed spaces, to the everyday landscape, ordinary places and the informal spaces of the street, highway, field and desert.

Traveling around the States on his motorbike in the 1950s, Jackson explored everything from the new strip road development to small towns in the high plains. The vernacular landscape intrigued and excited him. His musings on everything from mobile homes to hot rod culture found their place in his self-published magazine, Landscape. In Jackson’s eyes, the everyday landscape was rich with complexity, history and meaning. Taking Jackson's cue, people from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, from photographers to historians to philosophers and geographers, started taking a fresh look at the changing human landscape. Legions of place-seekers began to look closely at the world around them, seeking in the common landscape of everyday life an answer to the question: What do places mean?

Understanding place through the study of everyday landscapes can be as rewarding as it was when Brinckerhoff proposed his then-radical method over a half-century ago. But actually doing this isn’t as easy as it seems. “Americans,” writes University of California, Berkeley professor of Geography, Paul Groth, “are like fish that can’t see water.” Our lives, insists Groth, require a complex landscape of varied systems and spaces to support our habits of stasis and circulation. Unfortunately, most of us don’t consciously notice our surroundings. We take the immediate environment around us for granted. It’s almost as if the landscape around us is invisible—a void through which we move.

These days, understanding place is increasingly difficult. Powerful cultural, technological and economic forces challenge the value of the local, the ordinary and the mundane. In an increasingly globalized world, place remains elusive, fuzzy, distant. Images on our television and computer screens have created a visual culture that surrounds us, which often seems more than real. The contemporary cultural landscape we inhabit is a many-voiced endeavor, in which the common, everyday aspects of our lives compete with “virtual reality” and become increasingly difficult to focus on. The humble “workaday” world that Brinkerhoff loved so much is often overshadowed by the spectacle-based world with which it struggles to coexist. In our speeded-up society, time to stop and look is something most of us lack; as a result we often see the world through others’ eyes.

But even in our fast-paced world, the commonplace landscape still provides the setting in which our lives unfold, and denotes the interaction of people and place. By living in our local, everyday landscape, we are continually shaping our surroundings and reshaping the collective human landscape. Our everyday spaces, though often times mediated by new technologies and new patterns of mobility, are still the places from which we derive our shared identity. The vernacular landscape is not something frozen in time, but is, rather, a system of layers that involves both the present and the past. Looking closely, we can see that these places are often filled with examples of the delicate exchange between local conditions and human adaptations. A small house, a broken sidewalk and an unpainted fence have lots to tell us.

If in the 1950’s, cultural landscape study was relatively new terrain, investigating the intimate details of our everyday world has become more than just the work of academics. With low-cost digital cameras, locative media devices, and computer-based mapping technologies in reach of many young people, the search for and the redefinition of place continues with a renewed vigor. As human beings, we have a natural curiosity about the world around us. How we have and will continue to shape it, both for the good and for the bad, should be infinitely fascinating to all of us. The nature of place and the vernacular landscape will continue to be elusive concepts, but the desire to endow space with meaning is clearly innate. Our increasing attempts to identify and describe these spaces will evolve as we carry on with our observations of our cities, our streets and the smallest details that often go overlooked. 

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Book Cover of "Outside Lies Magic" by John R. Stilgoe

Encouraging the young to photograph, think about, and write about the local nature of place is a step in the right direction. Activities such as this spark interest in the commonplace world and its intricacies. Who knows, maybe helping our youths become active lookers just might inspire them to become civically responsible and socially concerned citizens! Getting our young folks outside, however, is the first step. There, “beyond the trap of the programmed electronic age” writes landscape historian John Stilgoe, we can take the time to “pay attention to everything that abuts the rural road, the city street, and the suburban boulevard.” Magic is to be found in our everyday places. We just need to look for it as we prod our students, teenagers and children to do the same.

Claude Willey, M.A.
Humanities Scholar-Consultant
Claude Willey is an artist and educator, teaching in the Urban Studies and Planning Department at California State University, Northridge, at Art Center College of Design, and Sci-Arc. He is co-coordinator of MOISTURE, a multi-year water research project in the Mojave Desert, and in 2007 he piloted the Invisible Trajectories project, a 'story-based' project looking at mobility and access limitations within California's Inland Empire. Over the past 10 years, Willey's activities have merged ecology, environmental history, renewable-energy technologies, urban transportation and landscape history. He recently curated an online exhibition, Conducting Mobility, for Greenmuseum.org and the Australian magazine, ArtLink, on transportation, migration, and energy. His current research is on wild rivers and the human desire to control them in the American West. Building on this body of research, he is headed to Arizona to participate in a month-long Environmental Borderlands NEH Institute for the summer of 2009. In addition to his research interests, Willey defines himself as a professional bicycle commuter, clocking 230 miles per week on the roads of L.A. County.