The Red File - Anne O'Callaghan

I walk, I see, I hear,
Walking “is a state in which the mind, body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together.”(Rebecca Solnit) I travel down intended and serendipitous paths, observing and documenting the world as I see it
I walk wherever I go, some times it is in a foreign place, not the place I call home. There are paths that are old friends. When “at home’ I walk along Lake Ontario. It is always changing, always a new experience. Bit and pieces of buildings- buildings about to be demolished or in a state of decay. What is their history, what is now lost. Walking spatializes the places where I walk, and I am often amazed by the extraordinary in the mundane.
At times I take many photographs, or just one. On my return from my journeys both long and short, I am often surprised by the images I have captured. In the course of 40 years of walking and taking photographs, there is always at least one where the colour red emerges as the main character. Red File China 1982, has a momentous history, (one of the rare interior images that I have taken), a lone visitor, no tour guide, I captured a relic of the past, a moment in my time and time past.