There are many different ways to approach a project and most of mine tend to be of a single place at a specific time. I know this because I often head out to a specific location (as part of my annual photo safari) and return with photographs of a specific place and time.
This seems to fall into a type of documentary/artistic effort creating stories about an experience which closely couples time and place. What if that link were broken? Suppose I photographed the same place at different times? Or, suppose that I gathered photographs together of different things at different times with the same meaning. By breaking this link between time and space, I can create a different type of project.
I’m in the final phases of completing a project that will be exhibited at the Page Walker Arts and History Center this week. It is an attempt on my part to break the specific time and place connection to create a different look and feel to this project. The project will be addressing the changes in a specific place over time.
I’ve been photographing Academy Street in Cary, North Carolina for the past thirty years or so. Each of the folios I created was at specific time and a specific place. After thirty years of photographing, I thought I needed to break the cycle and show photographs of change made in the same neighborhood.
The top photograph is the home located at 204 Academy Street in 2001. A few years ago, the house was cut in pieces and relocated down the street and around the corner. It was then supposed to be renovated. As plainly shown, the planned renewal has yet to happen. Photographing physical changes is easy to show, but the more difficult part of the project is to represent how the changes affect the community and the neighborhood. This takes a little bit more than photographs.
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