I’m a postdoctoral researcher in oenology, and I’m also a lifelong photographer. I’m also an amateur in the truest sense – someone who studies things for love of it rather than as a profession: botany, ecology, history, falconry, and language.
There’s a commonality, and a common theme to this, much as it might be hidden at first glance. I guess I’m drawn to careful observation and recording of minutiae that might otherwise go unseen, or dismissed as unimportant, ephemeral. Understanding how things actually work – how ecosystems function, how wine expresses the particulars of soil and climate, how a hawk hunts, how language carries meaning (or doesn’t), is a worthy aim in of itself. Seeing systems and interconnections rather than isolated facts.
I’m also driven by a conviction that place, and the spirit of place matters. Not just South Tyrol (though I live here now, and it’s a genuinely interesting place to study ecology and wine), but every place a person touches or is touched by. It’s the principle: understanding a specific landscape – its geology, its ecology, its history, its people – matters. That specifity exposes the patterns behind the generalities, and true generalities can be found hidden in the details of these specifities. (Everything is contigent on detail.)
Words matter too. I’m learning Italian and German, not as abstract exercises but as core parts of the place I live in now. As ways of thinking differently about the world. It’s argued that language shapes how we see things. Perhaps it does, or perhaps the way we see things shapes our language, or perhaps both. The precision of a field note, the vocabulary of wine tasting, the medieval terminology of falconry are at the core of how we actually understand what we’re observing, and how we communicate that understanding to others. (Or fail to.)
Photography connects all of this: it’s a tool for careful looking, for documenting what you’ve seen, for trying to communicate place and specificity to someone else. Most of my photography is about saying: here is something interesting I’ve seen. It might be as simple as the play of light on a building, or patterns in tree roots.
I’m not a falconer (yet?), though I’m fascinated by the practice – the precision of knowledge it requires, the relationship between person and animal.
I’m interested in these things seriously, but without the pretence of expertise. That’s what “amateur” means, and I’m comfortable with it. What I say, or think, or do, might often be wrong, or ill-informed, despite my best intentions.
This site reflects that sensibility: projects I’m working on, ongoing Field Notes as I document observations and research, and a Commonplace Book of resources that have shaped how I think, with quotes, notes, and photos. It’s not a professional site (that’s gavinduley.com ) and it’s not a blog (that’s blog.wodewose.org ). It’s a space for thinking and exploration that doesn’t fit elsewhere – thoughts, observations, projects, places, books. Unfinished, half-formed. Like the best of us. (And the worst.)