Lots of my photos could be called intimate landscapes because I focus attention on relatively small vistas. I like such imagery because it allows you to notice things – little details – that otherwise would pass you by. For example, this shot is of one small area directly under my desk where I work. The image highlights dirt marks around the empty plug and a slight budge in the lino flooring I’d not noticed until viewed in the photograph.
The image also shows a plaque Karen and I won a few years ago on a car rally in the lake district and the multiple plug points, but for me its main feature are the wires now needed to run a PC, router, printer, phone and all the other electrical gubbins we can’t do without creates its own sort of form. This vista, has, and no doubt will continue to change a lot, as technology moves on.
The photo brought to mind two mind two people’s work: the first is Laura Letinsky’s images of tableware and leftover meals (Link). Her images are about family, love and so quite different in intent as my image is about time and place in history. But the main connection was of the wire’s resonance with Marcel Duchamp’s Sixteen Miles of String that he exhibited in the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition in New York in 1942. The string was wound across, between and on other exhibits and paintings and so obscured and changed the nature of the exhibits and viewers’ experiences but images of it show it as the object rather than it obscuring other exhibits. My photo of wires doesn’t quite achieve that, but the point of view and framing mean that they have become part of the vista and their form does play an important role as we look at them rather than let our eyes pass through them to something else, something more significant in the frame.
anomiepete 