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Read a short description of this project
This work titled Concrete Photographs grew out of the broader and more open-ended Meandering with Purpose. As expressed in a slightly different way in the Meandering with Purpose statement, one of the goals of wandering around with my camera is to allow myself the creative freedom to stumble upon places that generate new work, or side projects. I have also found that while making photographs for Meandering with Purpose, my mind is able to drift in ways that spark ideas for completely unrelated projects. In other words, it is a way around the visual equivalent of “writer’s block.” People often describe creative blocks as hitting a brick wall; in this case, I ran smack into a three-sided concrete wall that surrounded a parking lot. However, when the stars faded from my field of vision after the metaphorical collision, this vertical surface proved to be exactly the opposite of the infamous “brick wall,” in that, this relatively small amount of real estate, hidden behind an office building complex, provided me with an enormous amount of inspiration. I have jokingly referred to this project as “concrete photography, well …um …alright, alright, photographs of concrete.” This tongue-in-cheek title came to mind, in part, due to the fact that these photographs resemble chemograms—a type of camera-less process that does fall into the category of concrete photography—but more obviously, because of the actual material that was photographed. As hard and impenetrable as concrete seems to be, these images reveal porous, fragile, and alchemical surfaces that have been poetically transformed through photography.