# Photography and mapping from Afar

> My piece for ‘Afar’ in Copenhagen, 2004, nine boards of images paired with GPS maps, documenting movement between London and Oslo over three months.

- Page: https://www.elasticspace.com/2004/07/afar/
- Author: Timo Arnall (https://www.elasticspace.com/)
- Section: Notes (https://www.elasticspace.com/notes/)
- Published: 2004-07-28
- Updated: 2026-07-05
- Tags: Art, Exhibition, GPS, Locative Media, Mapping, Narrative, Photography, Photo-research, Place, Travel
- Site map for agents: https://www.elasticspace.com/llms.txt

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Nine boards, four images each, above a set of GPS tracks drawn as simple lines. The images show a transition from London to Oslo across a winter and spring. The maps scale to the extents of the images above them; what you see on each board is the journey between the pictures.

*‘Afar’ was an exhibition at Råhuset in Copenhagen, 8–23 July 2004, where 25 international artists produced work responding to the word ‘afar’. The brief looked for connections across architectural, choreographic, street-art, design, audio, photographic, VJ, video, fashion, painting and creative-writing practice.*

### The piece

For three months I recorded every walk, drive, train journey and flight I took, while photographing spaces and places from daily life. Each image in the exhibition is captioned with location information and keyed to a point on the map below it. The images show spatial transition from one country to another, and a change of season.

The maps are GPS tracks, visualised as simple lines. The scale of each map is decided by the extents of the image locations. The maps give a sense of transition; scale and movement are emphasised.

![All nine maps from Afar exhibition in sequence](https://www.elasticspace.com/images/afar/afar_photo_map04.jpg)

*All maps in sequence (click for full size image)*

![All 36 images from Afar exhibition in sequence](https://www.elasticspace.com/images/afar/afar_photo_map05.jpg)

*All images in sequence*

![Detail of images from Afar exhibition showing location captions](https://www.elasticspace.com/images/afar/afar_photo_map06.jpg)

*Images (detail)*

![Detail of GPS track maps from Afar exhibition](https://www.elasticspace.com/images/afar/afar_photo_map07.jpg)

*Maps (detail)*

This is the first step towards a visual language for spatially located imagery, personal travelogues as communication and as artefacts of personal memory.