The 100 Metres Photo Exhibition featured 10 photographers, each one restricted to a 100 metre strip of land for 24 hours in different locations around Exmoor. The exhibition toured locations in Dunster, Lynmouth, Minehead and Taunton.
I enjoy photographing people so I chose a section of Dulverton; the length of Fore Street to Bank Square, which people would recognise as the core of the town centre. I chose a typically wet morning but it changed to a glorious afternoon and evening. (continued below)
Most of us visit a town on a mission and a deadline. For work or shopping people normally want to get in, achieve what they set out to do and get home again. In Dulverton there is a contrast between these visits and leisure activities: either by local people out for the day or evening; or the visitors and holiday makers, strolling at a different pace, sight seeing, window shopping, eating ice cream or popping into a cafe or pub.
Dulverton has everything that you would want to find in a small, English country town: provisions for the rural population, rest and repast for the traveller, spaciousness, graciousness and human hugger-mugger.
This project is about “mindfulness”, “inner calm” and “feeling the place”. Some might think that there is a contradiction between these things and a busy, town centre location. There need not be. Observing a town waking up, coming into life, winding down at the end of the day and returning to slumber, is in many ways like watching a life in the day of a living organism.
The life of a town is full of busy days; through the observance of but one day we may witness something of its life. Between the twilight before dawn and the hour after midnight I tried to record its breathing.
“It is a spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black. You can hear the dew falling and the hushed town breathing.” Dylan Thomas