Meet Me Outside

Six Propositions for Walking as Photographic Practice

paula roush

Presented as part of ERRAR — Conferência sobre Pesquisa Artística em Fotografia, Universidade Lusófona.

A keynote usually begins inside.
A room, a stage, a lectern, a microphone, a screen. A speaker faces an audience.

Meet Me Outside begins by displacing this arrangement. We meet at espaço kuadro, then leave the room and enter the field. The keynote becomes a walk: six propositions encountered through places, photographs, documents, questions and conversations.

There is no fixed position from which to speak. Knowledge is produced by moving through the territory — by following a route, deviating from it, encountering what was expected and what was not, and attending to what can and cannot be known.

To walk is also to err.

The six points on this map are therefore not simply destinations. They mark situations in an ongoing photographic practice: places where an image can return to its location, where the present encounters an archive, where a landscape carries several histories, and where fieldwork becomes a way of producing knowledge.

The map does not replace the walk. It is activated by walking.