WAKA · In Nature We Believewaka.gaiaeducation.org/collection/the-place-portrait/
The Place Portrait
One photograph of the same view, by everyone, all week
Make visible how much a single place changes in six days, and how differently twenty-five people see the same frame.
- Duration
- 2 min daily, 30 min to show
- Group size
- Any
- Setting
- outdoors
- Energy
- still
- Materials
- PhonesA marked standing pointA screen or a wall to project on
This is a seed card. The method is here; the images that make it worth looking at come from the voyages. The gallery on this page fills up as WAKAs happen.
An answer to the problem that documentation of a training week is always photographs of people looking happy, and never of the place they were in.
How it runs
- Day one: choose the viewpoint together. Mark the exact standing spot with a stone, and mark the direction. Somewhere ordinary is better than somewhere spectacular.
- Everyone photographs the same frame, once a day, at any hour they like. Same spot, same direction, whatever the weather.
- No editing, no filters, no people in shot.
- Last night: all images, in chronological order, projected without commentary. Then the same images grouped by day, so twenty-five versions of Tuesday sit side by side.
- One question: what did you see that nobody else saw?
Facilitator notes
- The value is entirely in the constraint. A group that drifts off the spot ends up with a pile of holiday photos.
- The best sequences come from bad weather. Do not cancel on a wet day.
- Ask permission before publishing anything, and put the sequence into the voyage’s page here — a place portrait from Grain&Sens in May and one from a Slovak forest in November is the argument for this whole platform.
Sequences collected so far
None yet.
