Ground shots and sky shots

Even in the arcades I noticed I had taken a lot of ground shots and overhead shots. Then again this week a lot of my pictures had a similar theme. That got me thinking. A lot of the world we see horizontally. People look left and right a lot. So why is it that I lot of my pictures are up or down?

In acting you can often get into a character better if you do something called the string exercise. You envision what you believe your character would be led by if they had strings pulling them at certain parts of their bodies. For instance if I were stuck up, or wanting to play this, I might have one string lead me by the chest and another leading me by pulling my head and nose up. By physically changing your body you change your perception and it is easier to "be" that person.

I started to think about characters when I noticed that a lot of my pictures were up and down and realized that often I am walking with my head down or up. As a character then I
might be lead by a string pulling my head down and out. My perception of the world changes when I am looking at the ground and this in turn says something about me as the photographer.

I often like pictures of the ground because they give me a feeling of something having happened here. The texture of stones or grass can be weathered and show that time has passed here. But I realized when re-looking at de Certeau's writing that this feeling cannot actually be "captured" in the photograph. He writes, "Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by...The trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten" (97). My feeling of wanting to show something that happened in a certain place may in fact do that but it does not mean that this is a totally positive thing. In fact by de Certeau's standards it would probably be better if I were to perform the picture taking act itself as the art. I could be in my "character" who looks down at the ground because then I am showing not just the trace of events but the discovery of the progress I found in the weathered stone. This discovery is more important in my real life than necessarily in a picture and is much harder to forget, at least for myself. Perhaps this is why I like Performance art.