'Cities’ Uniform' 2021 - Ongoing
Exploring the concept of places in a state of transit was the starting point for this project. The kind of places we would refer to as 'non places'. Places on their way to a new destination and utility. Advancing into the process, my photographic attraction grew gradually towards the anonymity these places embrace. The phenomenon of anonymity is becoming more prominent in Western urban architectural structures. This homogenization of newly built construction projects is leading to a loss of identity and a growing invisibility of authenticity and the people who construct them. The pictures made for this project are dislocated from any location reference, they could have been made in any Western city.
That zero-panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is—all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the “romantic ruin” because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise as ruins before they are built. This anti-romantic mise-en-scene suggests the discredited idea of time and many other “out of date” things. But the suburbs exist without a rational past and without the “big events” of history. Oh, maybe there are a few statues, a legend, and a couple of curios, but no past—just what passes for a future. A Utopia minus a bottom, a place where the machines are idle, and the sun has turned to glass.
Robert Smithson in The Monuments of Passaic, 1967
