The theme for the 15th print issue of the Fix is titled “Sense of Place.” This subject relies heavily on the submitting artist’s and viewer’s interpretation, but we at the Fix are defining it simply as “a response to an environment.”
You could talk forever about the relationship between people and the spaces they inhabit. We are simultaneously affecting the landscape while the landscape affects us. Where you are you when something happens to you, regardless of it being good or bad, important or unimportant, is crucial to your memory of that event. You never forget where you were when you met the person you fell in love with, where you were when someone close to you passed away, where you were when you figured out the thing that gives you purpose in your life.
I was 14 when I got my first camera. I pulled it from the bottom of a cardboard box at a yard sale I had biked past while in a small beach town on vacation with my family. The old lady that lived there said I could have it for two dollars; it was a small point-and-shoot film camera and she wasn’t even sure if it worked. I bought it and immediately went to a CVS nearby to purchase some cheap color film, Fujicolor 200 I believe, which I still shoot till this day. My inexperienced fingers clumsily loaded the film, and, without even knowing how to focus the camera, I pressed the shutter button. The bulb flashed, and everything suddenly made sense.
I will never forget the yard of the small blue beach house at which I bought my first camera, nor will I forget the palm trees that surrounded it or the ocean-side breeze that blew past as I spoke to the woman I bought it from. That small, specific area of the world is crucial to my memory of that event.
Your submission to this issue of the Fix doesn’t have to address this same connection between memory and place; there are many questions to consider when talking about this subject. How do we affect a place? How does a place affect us? How do we react to a space that something significant happened to us in? How do spaces evoke emotion from us, and why? How and why do we connect memories to spaces? How do characteristics of ourselves manifest in physical ways in the spaces we inhabit? What do we leave behind in a space, and what do we take from it? And, most important of all, how do we represent all of this in a visual form?
We look forward to reviewing your submissions.
Sincerely,
Camryn Drabenstadt
Editor-in-Chief
Photo by @bedfordtowers on Instagram