Wild walking: A twofold critique of the walk-along method

ion, to data analysis and interpretation, to literature accumulation and theory. Filming, as an aesthetic practice, works differently. Filming demands a different sensuous way of knowing than writing does. Filming asks you—indeed it can do nothing else—to tune your attention to bodily and material surfaces that can be seen or heard. Filming pulls you into a lifeworld that does not think; a lifeworld that can only move in myriad ways and speak in a cacophony of sounds and languages. Cameras and microphones are therefore potentially able to teach us to feel something different about a place. And herein lies the premise of my main critique of the walk-along method as is most often practiced within the social sciences today. But to be clear, I am not necessarily going to argue for the need to utilize video cameras more as part of a walk-along. Video-recording a walk-along is in fact not at all an unprecedented strategy. The best known practitioner of this approach is Sarah Pink, who a few years ago referred to the practice of filming walk-alongs as the “video tour” (Pink 2008). In a 2008 writing she describes it as such: The video tour is a collaborative method that involves walking around a specific place with a research participant. The research encounter is video recorded, by the researcher, and amongst other things might focus on aspects of the physical and multisensorial environment as ways of exploring material/sensorial practices and meanings, and place-making (Pink 2008, 7). After images from a walk-along are video-recorded there are two options available to a researcher. And it is at this junction where my true critique comes into play. Sarah Pink’s words (Pink 2007, 2008a, 2008b) can be used to describe the first direction one may take. “In this context,” Pink (2007, 243) observes with regard to the act of walking with a video camera, “video is not merely a method of audio-visually recording people and physical settings. Rather... walking with video provides ways of (to paraphrase Feld and Basso 1996, 91) sensing place, placing senses, sensorially making place and making sense of place.” Reinforcing this point, elsewhere, Pink (2008a, 2) writes: “the method of video recording research participants while ‘walking with’ them creates place on different levels: in a phenomenological sense during the research encounter; in the form of the video representation of that encounter; and again through the subjectivity of the viewer of that video.” Now, the trouble with this approach is that there is way too little emphasis what video does, and not enough emphasis on doing video, that is, on editing and sharing video recorded as part of walkalongs. In fact, despite the use of a video camera during data collection, rather than cinematic representations it is most often soundless and still photographic representations that such walks seem to yield in the published literature. For example in Pink (2007) we get just four still frames from the video 1 Within phenomenological traditions “lifeworld” refers to a universe that houses subjects’ experiences. As opposed to the more generic idea of “world” the notion of “lifeworld” underscores a horizon of unfolding feeling, sensation, consciousness, and perception. clips shot in the field. In Pink (2008a) only one color photograph is shown, whereas in Pink (2008b) only four black and white photographs are available. Others follow a similar path. Witmore (2004) has a few more photographs, a total of 10, but no video either. More recent studies seem to go down the same road of turning cinematic recordings into static representations. For example Yi’En (2014), despite using video while on the field, releases only photographic stills and sets of video frames. The list could go on, but the point would remain the same: in spite of all the recorded walking, only frozen visual depictions are made public. And in spite of all the talking, it is soundless textual transcriptions that can be found in the literature. And this, for me, is a serious problem. This is where a second course of action appears to be necessary. The alternative to the textualization of video is rather simple: if video of a walk is taken, video should be edited and shown. Cinema evokes movement, rhythm, and tactile contact with the ground (e.g. terrain and landscape surfaces) and with the air (e.g. changing light and weather) in a way that photographs and writing cannot. Moreover, cinema (except for silent versions) includes sound-recording and therefore gives off a sonic impression of places and voices, with their unique texture, pitch, volume, intonation, cadence, grain, and rhythm. Cinema, in short, allows for a richer—modally speaking—apprehension of what it is like “walk with” someone, somewhere. Though I am confident in the value of my opinion I am not so naive to think that producing, editing, and publishing video from walk-alongs is an invariably “better” option than writing or displaying photographs. Yet, having experienced firsthand what it is like to walk with a camera, and what it is like to narrate a tale from the field through video editing, I am certain in the value of this strategy of knowledge generation. To be sure, video is difficult to shoot and edit, yet it is getting easier and easier every day, and perhaps it is not more difficult than writing clearly and evocatively. Video and editing equipment can also be expensive. Yet it is not just as expensive as travelling to an international conference or two. Video production is time consuming as well, but so is doing ethnography as a whole. And certainly video is hard to publish and distribute widely, even though all that it really takes to make it accessible is uploading it on the Internet to a website like Vimeo or YouTube, copying a URL, and pasting that URL somewhere on the pages of an article or a chapter (not to mention that more and more journals nowadays actively solicit video content for their websites and are all too happy to embed Vimeo or YouTube content). In sum, taking video, and actually editing it and showing it in the shape of a narrative seems like a feasible way to evoke sensations of movement. Walking with a camera To deepen my argument I want to reflect on what it is like to actually walk with a camera for the sake of recording footage editable into a short documentary. Walking with a camera is like walking with an extension of your body and of your senses (as countless people have observed). A video camera can apprehend movement differently than any other medium. Video has the potential to animate the experience of place, an encounter with a person, and the sensations unfolding throughout the act of walking in a richly sensuous way. Video—I should note—is not intended to mimic or faithfully represent the experience of being there. Because video and film are an impression of movement—based on the playing back of still images at high speed (24, 25, or 30 frames per second, normally) video is an illusion, not a copy, of movement and rhythm. Let us focus a bit longer on the issue of rhythm. Each walk has its distinct rhythms. Cold legs at the start of a walk will slow you down and force you to fight against the ideal pace you should be keeping. Later, a fully warmed-up body will allow you to settle into a comfortable rhythm. Then there are the many breaks you end up taking: moments when you will find yourself struggling between the need to rest and the urge to go on before your legs go cold again. And then there are the last miles of the day, when your feet, knees, and back will start to feel pain and fatigue. Add to all this the rhythms of your mental wanderings, which often seem to have a will of their own. As Edensor (2010, 70) finds: “the rhythms of walking allow for a particular experiential flow of successive moments of detachment and attachment, physical immersion and mental wandering, memory, recognition and strangeness.” Walking, therefore, consists of weaving a spatial as much as a temporal path, a path contingent on both the physical characteristics of a place and the rhythmic and durational intensities in which it is kinesthetically stitched together. These are the rhythms evoked through the short video filmed throughout our time in Scotland. Walking with a video camera has its own unique rhythm, however, rhythms that are distinct from the act of walking without a video camera. When filming I—normally a slow but steady kind of linear walker—have to walk like a yo-yo: one moment ahead of everybody to take a shot from the front, the next moment lagging behind, slowed down by having to record a vista or a minute detail of the landscape. The camera has a rhythm too, one that is not necessarily the same as the one preferred by its operator. Cameras do not like to move very much. This is ironic for a cinematic medium (let us remember that the word “cinema” originates from the Greek word for movement). Camera movement causes shakiness and possibly loss of focus, which in turn cause viewers dizziness and headaches. The irony is double: when a camera represents movement faithfully (albeit with ugly results), a viewer will perceive the movement as unfaithful to the conventions of good cinema, of good movement. When a camera represents the movements of walking artificially (for example while gliding on a dolly), a viewer will perceive that movement as faithful. So once again, video works as an illusion. For the video camera walking unfolds as constant up and down motion that throws foreground and background out of sync. As a result walking with a video camera in order to shoot steady and editable images is taught to novices as a movement unlike normal walking: a movement more or less locked in at the hips, with the buttocks carrying the center of gravity low and even, and with both feet moving forward sideways out like a goose in order to avoid the springing up and down caused by the cyclical action of left and right calf muscles. L