Taking Pictures

This photograph depicts a visitor exploring Taking Pictures, a site-specific audio tour created for the Saint Louis Art Museum. The work explores the dynamics of memory and the passage of time with layers of sound and images. Unlike a traditional audio tour, which would lead the visitor through museum collections, Taking Pictures directs the visitor to exit the Museum and walk through the surrounding Forest Park. Cardiff's voice guides the visitor along a path, remarking on the differences between her experience of it at the time of the recording and her memories of an earlier walk she took with her mother on the same grounds. Snapshot photographs of that earlier walk are enclosed with the audio tour, and visitors are encouraged to compare these images with the landscape they see in front of them. "Move your eyes back and forth from one reality to another," she suggests. This simple strategy reveals, among other things, the effects of weather and the seasons' changes on the sites that have been recorded. As time passes, more and more of the landmarks that Cardiff noted in 2000 will shift-trees will die, paths will be redirected, new plants will take root. Participating in Taking Pictures brings us to the conclusion that, even when exactly the same route is followed, no two walks can be exactly alike.