HERE AND ELSEWHERE // 2007-ongoing
Here and Elsewhere is an ongoing project, comprised of a series of diptychs which couple a picture taken in the city with another from the countryside. Made while moving about intuitively, each individual image is focused on visual details - the people, objects, and buildings - with which I directly interact at the various places I visit in both rural and urban areas. Eschewing landscape photographs, which tend to create broad descriptions of places, I have opted instead to make closer explorations during my movements. I’m seeking to highlight those subtle arrangements, seemingly trivial, that depict the oddities, vitality, color, and humor found while observing everyday life in places near and far.
In the process of making these pictures individually I began to ruminate about the differences and the similarities found between urban and rural life. To further accentuate this thinking, I decided to arrange the pictures in diptychs with one image from each of the contrasting locations, using complementary thematic and visual elements as a guide for creating pairings. The portrait of a woman in the snow interacts with a poster of Audrey Hepburn in the window of a hair salon. The curious hanging of a bird cage on a city street bears an odd similarity to a box of ‘Mutt Mitts’ in the woods. Arranged together, the images in each coupling serve to act as counterpoints to one another, allowing for unusual, sometimes humorous, comparisons to be made. The mediation between city and countryside creates a heightened perception of each place, and forces us to consider each in a fresh way.
Click on any diptych to begin slideshow.
