Understanding Home (2019)
In 2018 I had the good fortune of staying with a friend in Manhattan for three weeks across the year. The length of my stays with him gave me a temporary relationship to his space and allowed me to be neither stranger nor occupant. Thus I was allowed in many ways to capture sights both seen and overlooked.
I of then find that in the course of weeks, months, years we tune out the things we see each day; a process which may be necessary to conducting our lives. In this subconsciously buried latitude I wanted to construct the above vignettes, hoping to say more about my friend’s home than a set of dramatically lit, wide angle shots from the corner of each room ever could. And so I sought to understand: pink steps underfoot; a cool grey light coming from dusty windows; a bare plumbing pipe ahead of me on the toilet.
The photos in this series fall somewhere between still life and texture studies. A 35mm lens provides a relatively flat understanding of the space, with little room for exaggeration. Similarly I chose to allow natural light to do all of the work, but visits across seasons let me wait for the right light to enter in to the compositions.