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| Legends, 2010 |
On leaving my house I travel in a circular fashion, walking along the peripheral routes that orbit my own neighbourhood. Navigating certain urban, manufacturing, retail and domestic centers, I have been using photography to map the psychological spaces of my immediate locale.
If the traditional notion of ‘neighborhood’ connotes familiarity and belonging, here the neighborhood becomes estranged by the cartographical act of photography itself. The act of photography distances one from the place depicted. The photographer always alien to the location of the photograph; intruder, outsider. The way people behave towards you is testimony to this. Thus, it is not my locale that I photograph, but that of another. It is an alien world I build when I make images, no mere document of a place, but a fantasy of place. A desire to belong to a space that cannot be occupied.
The local is a psychological construct that one never quite ‘fits’ within; there is always gap between familiarity and belonging. Spaces may look the same on a day-to-day basis, they may seem recognizable, usual, unremarkable, but on closer inspection they become uncannily strange - ungraspable and impenetrable. Hence the circular orbit. To maintain a distance.