|
Lost
in the Backyard Series
One woman’s peaceful country life can create
restless introspection for another. Wandering Garland County, Arkansas,
felt similar to exploring my backyard as a child. I spend my childhood
hunting for the perfect fort beneath the pine trees so I could be alone
and daydream. The countryside of Arkansas sparked a similar search.
I didn’t find country life to be peaceful. The
empty roads and open space were haunting as I looked for something to
photograph that would express the sensation of being alone and lost
in the country.
Objects sparkling off in the distance distracted me,
just as they did when I was a child, and I ended up stumbling upon someone
else’s patch of privacy hidden in the woods. I was compelled to
shoot with a low depth of field to keep the moments private because
I didn’t want to reveal their secret hiding spots, just expose
a glimpse of the isolated landscape.
These diversions, in turn, reflect my unresolved curiosity
to examine what lies in the shadows of the backyards around Garland
County. My non-conventional landscapes are fractions of land pieced
together; creating my vision of the solitude that lingers in the backcountry
of Arkansas.
1/15 of a Second Series
This project involves looking for certain visual arrangements
to express what I perceive as city dwellers wandering like zombies.
I photograph city landscapes and capture strangers drifting through
the space seemingly not noticing each other or the architecture surrounding
them. I deliberately photograph people out of focus just enough to make
you feel like you have seem them before while reinforcing the point
that we rarely pay attention to individuals walking by.
The flow of the blurry figures visually expresses the
muffled sounds of the urban environment and suggests the feeling of
people swimming past one another. I played with the space between each
figure to exaggerate the interaction of what I observe as pedestrians
playing hopscotch along the sidewalk trying to sustain anonymity within
the city machine.
This series is a work in progress currently including
50 images. These scenes are from London, New York, and Chicago reinforcing
the universals present in urban pedestrian behavior.
|