Irony in the Photography Life
Contemporary Spaces No. 1
The image in this post represents some new ideas and concepts that I am trying to apply to my photography. I imagined having a hypothetical conversation with someone who asked me to explain this more.
The first thing I would say to this person is that my intention with this photograph, as with all my photographs, is to make an image that is beautiful to look at as an object in and of itself. That is to say, beautiful apart from the subject depicted, beautiful instead as an arrangement of lines, forms, shapes, textures, and tonalities. Beauty of this kind for me stems from visual communication purely on an abstract level, and doesn’t rely on any particular person, place, or thing to be shown in the photograph.
But, of course, the image does have a subject, so the second thing I probably would say is that I am trying to make something beautiful out of common, everyday spaces. I titled the photograph “Contemporary Spaces” for that reason. To me, contemporary spaces include things like shopping malls, gas stations, office buildings, convenience stores, etc. Part of the inspiration for this came from seeing the work of Eugene Atget, who is well known for documenting the streets and cityscapes of Paris at the turn of the 20th century. To us now, those images look intriguing and exotic given the passage of time that has elapsed, but I imagine to Atget those simply were the contemporary spaces of his time. As mentioned, Atget was part of the inspiration for me, but in truth, even before seeing Atget’s work, I had been noticing our contemporary spaces here in the 21st century. They are so workaday and mundane to us that I think we often miss how interesting they really can be.
In my hypothetical conversation, I probably would go on to note that the more I looked at these spaces, the more a kind of philosophical issue became apparent. These spaces usually are a communal space that tend to concentrate gatherings of people, and yet being in these spaces often can make an individual feel isolated. When you’re at a shopping mall, gas station, office building, convenience store, etc., you’re often surrounded by people in close proximity, but I think often you’re not interacting with them other than transactionally, if at all. I think there’s an interesting tension between the communal nature of our contemporary spaces and the isolation you often feel in them, and I wanted to see if I could communicate that feeling in a photograph as well.
At this point, I realized that the hypothetical person I was having this conversation with would really have to be very interested in photography to find this conversation at all interesting. The irony is that in my own life, none of my personal friends and family are particularly interested in photography. If a conversation pertaining to this photograph were to come up, it probably would go something like this:
Other person: “What are you doing tonight?”
Me: “I’m going to the shopping mall to take pictures.”
Other person: “Oh, okay then, have fun.”
I don’t fault my friends and family for not being particularly interested in my photography. It’s my interest, not theirs, and I’m sure there are plenty of things they are interested in that I am not. It’s all good. But it does occur to me that my interest in photography is rich, deep, and a space that I inhabit largely by myself, which can be lonely sometimes.