Leap empty-handed into the void." This is an act of complete surrender, trusting in my training, proficiency, and experience acquired over the years. Then, as the actor, Frank Langella, also said, "you see what happens." For me, this work is one of discovery. When producing this project, I struggled with questions. "How is art made?" Is art a deliberate and planned undertaking? That question I will leave for the critics. Nevertheless, armed with an Olympus Pen—not quite the celebrated Leica, which many street photographers before me have used—proved to be more than adequate. Consequently, intuition is what made this project successful, as an instrument can never make you creative.
I made photographs unlike anything I have ever made before, and yet some of these photographs are as familiar as the voice of a dear friend telling a story of a day's adventure. On the other hand, these photographs are described as innovative, rare, genuinely novel, and surprising.
I travel in the back seat of the bus that serves the downtown area, a carefully planned route in its dedicated lane, and an accessible mode of transportation for the people of downtown Orlando, the Lynx Lymmo. That seat has become a well-known place to me, as the more than fifteen hundred captures collected for this work have required many trips.
“When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.”
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
This project was a journey of discovery by not constraining creativity with any preconceived notions. Going out and not having my mindset on anything seen or done before, prepared to experience and experiment with anything that might present itself. The initial act of this project was serendipitous; however, as the project evolved, the earliest photographs made it quite clear that this quest would be rich with possibilities to be uncovered by the camera lens. Having discovered the opportunities and possibilities that could be explored, all that was left was to follow with a deliberate and purposeful design.
The photographs were made through the literal and figurative holes of advertisements attached to the bus's windows. Ads that were, in many cases, promoting hyperrealism. The photographs then become encoded literally and figuratively by that filter of the bus's window at the point of departure. No key to the cipher will be provided to decode the encrypted within the visual phrases; your own experience is all that is required.
“Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.”
-Jacques Derrida.
“What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once:
the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”
the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
