Leaving Traces

A temporary circle appears on the snowy floor of a forest in Tierra del Fuego. Nearby, traces of footsteps, mud, ash, and weather quietly record the passage of a body moving through the landscape.
In this episode, we explore the work of Richard Long through a series of photographs and texts produced during a six-day winter walk in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego in 1997. Moving beyond the idea of walking as journey or endurance, we consider how Long's work focuses on contact: the brief marks left behind when movement meets the ground.
Through circles, boot-heel lines, scattered ashes, and temporary inscriptions, Long invites us to think about walking, landscape, memory, and the fragile traces that remain before eventually disappearing.

Related images and references:
PhotographyAndWalking.com

Un cercle temporaire apparaît sur le sol enneigé d'une forêt de la Terre de Feu. Autour de lui, des traces de pas, de boue, de cendres et de météo témoignent discrètement du passage d'un corps à travers le paysage.
Dans cet épisode, nous explorons l'œuvre de Richard Long à travers une série de photographies et de textes réalisés lors d'une marche hivernale de six jours en Patagonie et en Terre de Feu en 1997. Au-delà de la marche comprise comme voyage ou performance, nous nous intéressons à la notion de contact : les marques fugitives laissées lorsque le mouvement rencontre le sol.
Cercles, lignes tracées par une botte, cendres dispersées par le vent et inscriptions temporaires deviennent autant de façons d'interroger la marche, le paysage, la mémoire et les traces fragiles que nous laissons derrière nous avant qu'elles ne disparaissent.

Related images and references:
photographyandwalking.com

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Music: “Beat ’em with Rhythm” by Victor Natas, edited for this podcast (CC BY 4.0, Freesound.org).

Produced by Productions 3655 Inc.   

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There is something unusually quiet about these photographs by Richard Long. At first they can seem almost reluctant to announce themselves. Snow, mud, trees, stones, dark water, uneven ground. The surfaces feel exposed to weather and time. The circles we see sometimes emerge slowly, almost hesitantly, from within the landscape itself, as though they had not been imposed onto the terrain, but discovered there briefly before disappearing again. One photograph that stayed with me is called Tierra del Fuego Circle, along a six-day winter walk, Argentina nineteen ninety seven. The picture shows a winter forest in Tierra del Fuego, near the southern edge of South America. Thin trees lean unevenly through the frame. Snow remains scattered across the ground in irregular patches, while darker earth appears beneath it. Near the center of the photograph, a circular form becomes visible on the forest floor. It is neither monumental nor dramatic, just a temporary inscription appearing quietly within the landscape. This is photography and walking. Richard Long's work is often discussed through the idea of walking, and understandably so, because walking has remained central to his practice for decades. One of his earliest and most influential works, A Line Made by Walking, from 1967, already contained many of the ideas that would continue through his later art. For this photograph, Long repeatedly walked back and forth across a field, until the movement of his steps created a visible line pressed into the grass, which he then photographed. For many people, that image became one of the defining icons of walking art itself. But what interests me here is not simply the fact that Long walked through Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego in 1997. Walking itself has remained central to his art since the beginning, and in many ways that history also overlaps with the work of Hamish Fulton, whom we encountered earlier in the series. The two artists studied together at St. Martin's School of Art in London in the late 1960s and became closely associated with the emergence of walking as an artistic practice, though their approaches to walking differed significantly. Returning only to distance, weather or endurance, however, would flatten something important in Richard Long's work, because Long does something else, he leaves traces. Not permanent marks, not gestures of conquest or ownership, but temporary inscriptions, circles made in snow or mud, lines pressed into the ground by boots, fires reduced to ashes blowing into the wind. Again and again in these works, the surface of the landscape becomes something capable of receiving contact, and that changes the feeling of the walk itself. There is another work from this same Argentine series called To Build a Fire, accompanied by a short text. It goes a six day winter walk on Tierra del Fuego, building a fire each day at each campsite along the way, ashes blowing in the wind. The sentence is extremely simple, almost matter of fact, and perhaps that is partly why it stays with us. Long does not dramatize the walk or transform the landscape into a stage for personal revelation. Instead, the work accumulates gradually through small gestures and fragments, circles, ashes, footprints, short pieces of language. And as we spend time moving through these photographs and texts, what begins to emerge is not walking understood as journey, but walking understood through contact. These photographs are not simply records of objects placed into the landscape afterward. The forms emerge from the rhythm of the walk itself. The body moves through terrain and from time to time stops, gathers, arranges, presses, circles, leaves behind a temporary form, and then continues onward. So in a sense, the walk leaves a visible residue behind it. In another text from the Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego works, Richard Long writes A boot heel line in dust in Riomayo, a boot heel line in mud in Caleta Olivia, a boot heel line in snow in Ushuaia. Reading those lines aloud, you begin to feel how repetitive they are and how physical the repetition becomes. Dust, mud, snow, and then again another boot heel line, another surface receiving the same gesture under different conditions. So the language itself begins moving almost like footsteps. And perhaps this is where Long's work moves away from conventional landscape photography. The landscape here is not simply something viewed from a distance. It becomes something entered physically, crossed repeatedly, touched by weather, movement, and time. Even the circles themselves feel less like autonomous sculptures than brief moments of contact between a body and the ground beneath it. At the same time, the marks remain remarkably modest. That matters too. Nothing in these photographs attempts to overpower the landscape. The circles are temporary and vulnerable and sometimes barely visible at all. Snow melts, wind scatters ashes, mud collapses back into itself, and eventually the traces disappear completely. So what remains are the photographs and the texts. And even there Long keeps things unusually open. In a talk given at the Nayoshima Contemporary Art Museum in Japan in 1997, Long described his work very directly. He said As well as making art only by walking, walking also is a way to find the beautiful landscapes of the planet. Then a little later, one of the forms that my work takes is to make sculptures along the way. Along the way. This phrase feels central to these Tierra del Fuego works. The sculptures here are not isolated objects waiting at the end of the walk. They emerge inside movement itself, inside weather, fatigue, passing time, changing ground conditions. They appear temporarily through the relationship between a moving body and a place. And perhaps this is also why the photographs themselves feel so quiet. They are not trying to conclude the experience. Looking at the four circle photograph, for example, we never feel that the picture fully contains the work. The photograph points outward toward the walk that preceded it, and toward the disappearance that will follow afterward. The circle already feels temporary while we are looking at it. I think this is one of the reasons Richard Long's work continues to hold attention, despite its simplicity. The gestures remain extremely reduced, circles, lines, stones, footsteps, ash, and yet the work never feels empty or purely formal. Again and again, the photographs return to small traces left behind by movement through a place. Photography and language both matter here. The photographs show us circles in snow, bootmarks in mud, ashes scattered on the ground, while the texts remain sparse and direct, often little more than places, weather conditions, or brief descriptions of actions. And slowly, moving back and forth, between the photographs and the language, the walk itself begins to take shape. I found myself thinking while looking at these pictures, that Long's work remains very close to the ground. That may sound obvious, but I mean it literally. So much contemporary image culture pushes towards spectacle and scale, while Long repeatedly returns to surfaces shaped by weather, movement, and time. And as I spent time with these pictures, what stayed with me the most strongly was not Patagonia itself or the scale of the six-day walk. It was the modesty of the gestures, a temporary circle in a forest, a trace left briefly in snow before disappearing again. In some ways, this episode also continues questions that have been emerging gradually throughout recent episodes of photography and walking. In the previous episode Drawing Walking Space, we looked at Helen Levitt photographing a child drawing with chalk on a New York sidewalk. There too, surfaces became temporarily transformed through human gestures. With Richard Long, the setting becomes completely different. The dense city gives way to remote landscapes in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, but certain questions remain surprisingly close. What happens when movement leaves traces behind? How does a temporary mark alter the experience of a place? Even briefly. Long never answers those questions directly. The works simply remain close to the traces themselves. Near the end of his talk in Japan, Richard Long quotes a Chinese saying Every long journey starts with the first footstep. It is a phrase we have heard many times before, perhaps too many times, and yet here it regains something simple and physical a person walking through a landscape, leaving traces behind, and then continuing onward. You've been listening to Photography and Walking, I'm Philippe. You can find related images and references at photography and walking dot com. And if you'd like to receive occasional notes connected to the episodes, you can leave your email through the contact page on the website. Thank you for listening and see you next time.