Road scholar

The signature image from Peter Coffman's exhibition Camino, now on display at Viewpoint Gallery. (Peter Coffman Photo)

“It is continuous, unbroken... changing in shape, colour, texture, mood... the one constant is the sound of footsteps. We walk together but from our first step to the last cobblestone, for each of us, the camino is our own.”

Peter Coffman and Oliver Schroer tell the tale of their pilgrimage along the Camino Santiago through music and images now on display at ViewPoint Gallery. And what a tale it is.

As Mr. Schroer’s violin resonated through age-old churches along the camino, Dr. Coffman was capturing the spiritual journey with breathtakingly beautiful photographs.

The only colour image in the show is Mr. Coffman's photo of his friend Oliver Schroer playing his violin in one of the churches along the way.

In the spring of 2004, the pair of old friends booked off two months to walk about 1,000 kilometres of the pilgrimage road that runs through France and Spain. The camino nourished both of them creatively; before Mr. Schroer passed away last summer, he released Camino, violin music that he recorded with a portable studio. Meanwhile, the road trip reawakened Dr. Coffman’s love of photography; his photography graces the cover of his late friend’s album cover and the liner notes.

Dr. Coffman, a Killam postdoctoral in the Department of History at Dalhousie, describes the experience as “rich and very multi-textured.”

“It is a very profound experience of personal growth. It certainly enlarges your sense of what is possible.”

It’s not an easy journey. While walking the road, you’re apt to encounter various forms of weather, from cold, rainy and hailing, to hot and humid.

Along with various weather conditions, the landscape is always changing. Dr. Coffman says that walking the Camino made him very aware of the subtle changes in the lsurroundings.

“Every change in the landscape actually has an immediate impact on how you feel. That intimate relationship with this ever changing landscape is certainly something that I will never ever forget,” he says.

His photos captured the beauty and power of those various landscapes. The black-and-white image that has become the icon of his camino collection is truly spectacular: it depicts bold hills overlapping in gradients, with the sharp contrast of a light road weaving its way up the darkest hill in the foreground.

He says the photo gives “a sense of what it feels like to be a very tiny person in this very vast landscape. And what it is like to be a tiny person travelling this narrow, sinewy road that slices so emphatically through this vast landscape.”

LINK: ViewPoint Gallery