Peregrination

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Peregrination is an old word for a journey on foot. It probably comes from the French “pèlerinage” meaning pilgrimage. The building was inspired in part by Gormenghast castle in Mervyn Peake’s  Titus trilogy.


The pathways in this building are in fact a single horizontal plane. There are no less than twenty two false links which treat this single plane as different levels ...... stairs and ladders which simply serve to join the same level to itself.


The idea was originally conceived as a board game in the spirit of the old “Snakes & Ladders” which was so popular when I was a child. This is why the pathways are divided into squares and have start arrows. The squares with the stars in them were intended to win or lose advantages if you landed on them. However if you topologically “flatten” the image  the pathways formed by the false links so completely defy any logic that, in the end, I was never able to devise anything to work and it remains simply an intriguing image.


This is one of the most complex of all my images. It was made over the course of five months. Two months of planning and photography and three months of compositing. Over six hundred purpose taken photographs were produced during the making of this.