"Thank you! this is a fantastic tool for planning walking adventures in the uk." @GusLegend
What is the gazetteer?
The gazetteer is my personal collection of material treasures. It's a growing map of wonders that I've spent over forty years documenting. The treasures that I list here are not of any monetary value, but far more valuable.
Andy Marshall
More about the Gazetteer
The things in my gazetteer know more of me than I do of them. I share them with the gratitude that, through a strange quirk of career, I’ve had a certain freedom to be able to seek them out and photograph them.
I’m overwhelmed with a feeling that these things need to be communicated. My camera acts not only as a tool for recording but also a means of acknowledging their relevance and mine.
These treasures are significant because they have given me something beyond their physical presence and opened up portals to the past and the people that inhabit it. Marinated in myth, they are beacons that teach us that there are alternative, nourishing, and deep-rooted value systems that we are at liberty to engage with.
These artefacts all have a faceted connection with the wider world and with another dimension - that of the past. They are all material repositories of memory and meaning. Many of these treasures were invested at the time of their making with meanings beyond their material value, memories that are still lukewarm in the forms they present.
These treasures hold within them narratives that have the power to help us understand who we are and change the way we see the world. Having survived thus far, they know something of humanity and are telling in their survival. Together they are a vast cultural repository of meaning, the loss of which would be detrimental to our lives.
As a photographer I’ve spent countless hours engaging with these objects and places, capturing them in the moving light. Many of them haven’t revealed their nature until I’ve spent a significant amount of time with them. Time spent exploring the details is never time wasted.
I encourage you to seek them out, whether it be an act of pilgrimage, or ticking off a bucket list. I also encourage you to record them with your camera, pencil or brush and share them.
Let us create, beyond the vast network of material treasures of Great Britain, a visual cosmos of photographs, paintings and words that help others form attachments and bonds that might contribute to their survival.
This Gazetteer is dedicated to the memory of David Morris. A close friend and mentor who is sadly no longer with us. He taught me that it was possible to make coherent the incoherent and that the seemingly innocuous minutiae of our lives are more important than we will ever know.
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