There are so many different ways of seeing things, even those things that we encounter every day. But likely, we don’t question our perspectives of the things we see every day. We grow accustomed to our routines, and complacent with our thoughts, and it becomes difficult to break out of that kind of tunnel vision. However, photography affords us an interesting and unique opportunity. We can use photography to capture images of the places and things we pass every day, and through the process of taking the pictures, as well as analyzing the pictures after the fact, it can make us question what we see and how we see it.
This is an important subject, because new perspectives can really open up our minds to new ideas, new thought processes, and overall can really enhance our internal lives. That’s why I chose this topic, and am using pictures of the seemingly mundane to achieve it. There are two ways in which the pictures aim to achieve that. One is by portraying things we see from unconventional angles, like the pictures of the buildings from an upward angle, for example. The second is through photographs taken straight on from the exact angle we would normally see it, as if we were passing by on the street. I know that second method seems counterintuitive; how could a picture of something I see regularly, taken in a way I would regularly see it, make me think about things differently? Well to answer that question, it’s because you’re seeing it now in a photograph. If you were looking at it in real life it wouldn’t mean anything to you. But the fact that it is now in a concrete picture, shows that someone had the intention of taking a picture of specifically that, and that fact will, therefore, make you question why they even did that. Then that thought in turn will lead to a whole slew of other thoughts about the nature of that initially mundane object.
In an excerpt from her book, “Regarding the Pain of Others”, Susan Sontag brings a couple of quotes from 19th century poets. The sentiment of these statements is that people crave, and are desensitized to, extraordinary/horrific events. She then continues, “this process of overstimulation acts ‘to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind’ and ‘reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor’”. What Sontag is describing here (with the help of Wordsworth), is precisely what my collection of photographs aims to avoid. Sontag says that astonishing news pieces, and astonishing pictures in the news, essentially lead to a mental disintegration, and in keeping with that sentiment, pictures of the mundane should act to sharpen the mental faculties.
These photographs individually also differ from their nature as a cohesive unit. For instance, individually they vary widely in fascination, while as a group they take on the average feeling of all of them put together. For example, a picture of a front door is frankly, just boring to look at. To use Barthes’s terms, there is no punctum, nothing that punctures you and draws you in. But a picture of a mirror which is reflecting something else in the background can be very interesting. In contrast, the combination of interesting pictures with not so interesting picture levels out the variance in a viewer’s potential fascination, and shows a unified theme. This serves my purpose of ultimately questioning the things we see on a regular basis. Some things we encounter might seem interesting to us, and some things not, but what does that tell us about how meaningful they are? Can we draw as much meaning from a plain old front door as we do from a bright, gaze-capturing mirror? These are the kind of questions I was hoping to elicit with my portfolio, and if viewers were to see just one of any of the photographs, instead of all of them, the effect would be completely different.
In addition, these photographs are not highly organized, and this is by design. I intentionally avoided an extremely thought-out ordering of the pictures in my portfolio, in order to try and simulate real life. When you’re walking down the street, things won’t be organized in a way to specifically try to catch your attention and make you think about them. It might happen to turn out that way, but it’s usually random, and so I compiled the photographs randomly.
In conclusion, what I’m hoping is that four pictures of doors and the objects surrounding them, three upwards angled pictures of buildings, two pictures of furniture on sidewalks, and one picture of a street corner can convey that there is meaning all around us just waiting to be explored. We don’t need to venture outside of our city limits to inspire our thoughts, rather the objects within the city limits can achieve that for us.
