Footpaths and Memory

Intrigued by the idea of the landscape and memories I have experimented with the following images. I was prompted to blog them when one of my peer to peer hangout group suggested that he saw my footpath images " as traces, evidence of footsteps, memories of human purpose; perhaps just memories."  He felt that the wide open glades make a sense of human presence manifest, we know that many thousands of people have walked here before.  However, the paths become more and more faint until "perhaps the brush of grass is sent one way and not the other and this is a palimpsest; a trace of a path, a memory."
These comments reminded me of the images below that I had made before the hangout when I had been thinking along the lines of landscape and memory.  I have often reflected that we have memories of our walks and wanted to record this idea in single images.  To do this I took one image and then walked on, stopped and took another image looking along the path and repeated this up to five times.  Then, in photoshop I layered these images over one another in much the same way as memories are layers of our past experiences.  In the first of the to images below the constituent shots are straight photographs; in the second pair I moved the camera slightly on exposure to give a more abstract feel.  Perhaps these images can be thought of as photographic palimpsests.  At the moment these are just experiments as I am not sure that they fit with the main series of images in my work.  It is tempting to continue trying new ideas, but at this stage in my BOW I feel that I need to consolidate rather than keep making new images.  Still I shall keep this idea in mind for future work.  Perhaps I could continue to work on the idea during SYP with the idea of an extra series of images for a final exhibition or book.