Hidden Gems of the Mundane
We encounter litter on a regular basis, but to most passersby these discarded, ordinary objects do not play a role in their daily life. Nowadays we are always rushing, too busy to really pick up on our surroundings. However, I feel the need to pay attention to that which otherwise goes unnoticed—it becomes a (re)source of inspiration and the subject of my work. The city in particular seems to act thought-provoking as the innumerable lives and dwellings within it make time shift and bend in unpredictable ways. Everything within the cityscape seems to be connected, nothing possesses a single or exclusive life.
Hidden Gems Of The Mundane is an ongoing series about my fascination for everyday objects, and how people consume, accumulate and reject them. Like a modern day Flâneur, I stroll and explore the urban landscape without a planned route or particular destination. Using my camera to break down the city’s surface, I enter a world inside the world that we see, like a parallel universe where one man’s trash becomes another man’s treasure (quite literally).
These are observational images of ordinary items I find on the streets, that have all sat undisturbed, waiting to be collected or photographed. There is a sense of history to the objects in that they evoke memories and associations through visible evidence: signs of love, abuse and neglect. You can see the state of these objects and debris as demonstrative of our consumption patterns and the continually transforming relationship between humans and their environment.
The simple paradox of photographing something that is typically considered ugly, useless, unappealing and dirty, challenges me to think and look afresh. I ponder and speculate about the stories behind my encounters. Who did this item belong to? I try to put a face and name to something inanimate as the search for a thing and the search for a person seems inseparable. How did it end up here and what might happen to it after I have taken a picture? I can’t preserve these objects, but I can capture them — and the effects of time in a sense — before they disappear, which can happen at any moment.
The will to catalogue has proliferated in a literal sense with inventories of all kinds of random found items, as if preparing documents for a book that describes every little aspect and fragment of the world. And yet in these accumulations of things, I am not assembling anything that amounts to proof. Rather, archiving and collecting is a kind of compulsive activity that I cannot suppress.
In an to attempt capture the atmosphere and physical properties, documenting my findings in a way that calls attention to their aesthetic qualities, I do not move or position anything, I simply record these items as I find them.
With these images I aim to bring out the visible details and traces of everyday life - the impact of humans on their surroundings. Though these images are simply a presentation of my own playful observations, on another level, the work allows us to look beyond our presumed ideas of value and utility and to reflect on our ecological footprint. Ultimately, these photographs outline a particular exercise of seeing and thinking which I intent to share with others: to become more aware of what is already there. Once you tune into this sort of thoughtless act, you start observing the world very differently.
I am interested in how items move through categories of in-use, rubbish, recycled and re-used. Though artificial objects appear to be in an unchanging, fixed state, in actuality, as is true with nature, they are in stages of transformation and decomposition. The degradation of man-made materials is a much more time consuming process. This occasionally generates stark contrasts within the natural and urban landscape, but the lines between the two have blurred increasingly. More than ever are we becoming accustomed to seeing waste. Like a soldier in camouflage or a chameleon during times of distress, it blends in with its surroundings.
