Saturday

Passport to My Neighborhood - an Introduction


Regardless what we use to take our pictures with, in our heart we yearn for distant places, lands that are far away, with strange sounding names and things all foreign to us. And when we host a guest from either another city, state or country, we always are told what a great place we live in, there is so much to see and photograph. Yet when I go out to do a little picture taking, I cannot find anything interesting to photograph. Ever have that same experience?




‘Passport to my neighborhood,’ the series, is all about learning to see, beginning to look at our own neighborhood from the perspective of an inquisitive mind and while your surroundings and esthetics differ from mine, we are only separated by an idea. 


Our eyes are not ours to command; they roam where they will and tell us they have only been where we have sent them. No matter how hard we look, we see very little of what we look at.
                                                            James Elkins


We are bombarded daily with sound-bites of images from news media, advertising agencies, print, let alone our own social media to which we subscribe to, that we have become mostly desensitized, immune to the characteristic qualities of what we are looking at. We must begin to undo the damage and learn to examine our surroundings by overcoming false standards which have became firmly established in our mind and at these limitations we have allowed to impose upon ourselves, must be first unlearned, thereby recapturing the innocence we once had as a child when the world looked grand and full of wonder. 



Torn magazine collage reworked in Decim8


We will retrace together our steps as if rewinding a film, observing our own retrospective like detectives going over a cold case file and reviewing the staggering abundance of evidence that was first overlooked. The reliability of our findings is based upon the objectiveness we are willing to see.  


We will look at that which we have seen daily, taken for granted or simply not noticed and we will create an environment confined within the space of a table, complete onto itself. We will no longer see a blank canvas, but one filled with possibilities, enriching our daily visual thinking.




Torn fliers stapled to a telephone pole




Remains of the mens locker room at an abandoned factory




Hand rail




Standing in front of a glass door




Remnants of a factory now converted to a winery 




Tabletop set for the series ‘Botanical Studies’




The side of a barn



All photographs taken with an iPhone 4S by
©2014 Egmont van Dyck - All Rights Reserved








1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great post! Love the concept and the photos are excellent as always!

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