Urban Landscapes and Wilderness

Often as both a child and an adult, I read about how wonderful it is for children to go exploring in the woods, to lose themselves in a sort of wilderness.  In my life, I’ve also gotten exposed to a few corny movies dwelling on this phenomenon.  And then there was a ton of stuff in the horror genre, both stories and movies, which dwelled on this or that old house deep in the woods, which, while supposedly horrifying, was  really a celebration of the thrills and mysteries that can be enjoyed, especially when you’re a kid, from exploring unknown terrain deep in the woods or forest.  Of course, going way back, there were a whole bunch of fairy tales about that too.

But since I was born and raised in New York City - mostly in some very urban areas of the The Bronx - and spent my whole life in very urban parts of big cities, I haven’t had that kind of experience with the forest or the woods.  All this stuff in the movies and in old books about kids’ scary adventures in the forest were sort of like stories from another world for me.  On the other hand, I had my own wilderness to explore, which I deeply appreciated as a child and still appreciate fully now.

Thanks to Wood’s Lot, tonight I’ve found a wonderful piece of text describing this other wilderness in terms that fit very well with my own thoughts and memories.  And, actually, it’s written by a photographer, as an introduction to a beautiful set of photographs.  That photographer is Paul Raphaelson, and this work is included in a new site called Urban Landscapes.  Raphaelson writes:

In the early nineties I lived in a working class neighborhood in Providence, Rhode Island, which was surrounded by sprawling reaches of hard to define space.  Old New England houses mingled with empty lots, crumbling husks of factories, tract houses, and a dizzying web of trees, weeds, cyclone fences, and high tension wires.  Layers of growth and decay concealed any easy answers.  While it could seem as if the landscape had been born of a simple mix of accident and neglect, the feeling was one of a larger process at work.  I saw a kind of unconscious synergy in the acts of people, nature, and erosion that had shaped these spaces over many years.  When I later moved to an industrial section of Brooklyn, New York, the mix of these elements changed, but the underlying feeling stayed the same.  There was more to the garbage than garbage; more to the desolation than desolation.

I titled the work Wilderness early on, in response to these impressions.  The word has meant different things to different cultures over the years, but it has usually carried senses of mystery, of darkness, and of an emergence somewhere outside the borders of the comfortable and the known.

The Wilderness has been a place that we feared but at the same time longed for, often with a sense that only there, far from the safety and attachments of our everyday lives, might we finally find ourselves.

Exactly!