The Ultimate Space and Place

The social network I'm following for my blog is Flickr, which deals with photographers and their photos, how they take them and then sharing online with like minded people. Photographers work in the wide open spaces like the countryside or take seascapes. Or, they can work in the more confined space of the studio where they are more restricted in the subject martial that they can use. The theologian Tillich experienced, as a young child, the restricted area of a small medieval town in eastern Germany, in which he lived at the turn of the century. It was surrounded by a wall and was administered from a medieval town hall (Tuan,1977. p.3) .Tillich, once a year, went to the Baltic Sea with his family, which gave him more freedom to move around, as was mentioned in a set reading ( Week 3 lecture, BA1002. 2017). In relation to power and space in my social network, space is the format a photographer works under and it gives him resources online to display his photos to his fellow photographers and anyone who cares to look at them. Photography, being a form of communication, has the power to inform people of events more so than the written word, as they say “a photo is worth a thousand words”. The photographer also has the power, especially those more experienced over the not so experienced, by telling them where they are going wrong and making them feel dis-empowered, until they gain more experienced.

Another form of space is outer space, although infinite, is restrictive like Tillich's home town due to the lack of technology and the very few who are fortunate enough to experience space travel. The ultimate place would be to live on another planet, and have the experience of exploring the wide open spaces on the new planet ( http://www.mars-one.com/ ). 

 

                            (Fig1: The Ultimate Space: Centre of the Galaxy. Carl Tanner, 2016)

A place can be where one lives, it can be where you work, it's where you belong, according to Tuan (1977. p4.) from our week 3 reading. A place can change it's status, just by somebody famous living there or presumed to live there. Like the castle physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg visited and imagined Hamlet living in, Kronberg Castle in Denmark. A place can also be where animals have a sense of territory and of place, spaces that are marked off and defended against intruders. Places are centres of felt value where biological needs, such as those of food, water, rest and procreation are satisfied.

Places can mean many different things to many people. It can mean where we work, play or just belong. It's a place we vigorously protect against intruders and every human and non-human has a right to have and enjoy. Place is security. Space can also mean a lot to people as no-one likes to be confined in small places. They like their freedom and so do animals. They tend to get restless when confined and in some cases become dangerous. Space and place go together as they can't really be separated.

References:

Mars One Foundation (2011). Mars One, Retrieved 11 Aug 2017 from http://www.mars-one.com/

Tanner, C (2016). The Ultimate Space: centre of the galaxy. Fig 1 Photograph (personal collection)

Tuan, Yi-Fu; (1977). Introduction:Space and place, the perspectives of experience (p.1-7). London, UK. Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd.