Buen Camino | Ballarat International Foto Biennale
DATE: Aug – Sept 2015
LOCATION: The Mallow Hotel
This exhibition was a collaboration with Alison Shirley . The work on this website was my part only, you can see Ali’s images from the show here
“Buen Camino” is the most common phrase you will hear during your walk of the Camino de Santiago in Spain.
The journey is embarked upon by all walks of life, for different reasons. We took the last 100km and met (and were overtaken!) by many people who had walked different legs of the journey, many from the start, over 800 km away.
As I walked with my partner and co-collaborator for our documentary photography exhibition “Buen Camino” at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, I began asking people what made them walk. They told me their own stories as well as stories from others they’d met along the way. Some funny, some sad, some heartbreaking, some ordinary and some extraordinary.
“At 70 years old, the walk was a challenge for us. We met up with a 78 year old man walking on his own in memory of his wife… He had been going to do the walk with his wife, but she died and he decided to go anyway and had taken her ashes with him. He left her ashes at various churches along the way… It was touching but somehow not sad as he was so positive about everything. We learnt such a lot from people we met and were humbled by some of their achievements…” Morwenna Hocking and Magdalen Crawshaw, UK
The walk brings you down to the essentials in life. Breath, food, water, sleep and human interaction.
The images below are all mine from the show, however you can view Ali’s work which focused more on the landscape we journeyed through here