Project Tag: Photography

Waiting rooms

The idea for this series of photographs came from thinking about Edward Hopper’s painting, ‘Nighthawks’. In this painting there is no door to the street, so the characters at the bar have no visible means of escaping. This idea is linked with the boredom of travelling.

As an increasing proportion of our lives is spent in petrol stations, train stations, motorways and airports we find ourselves inhabiting a series of ‘waiting rooms’. These places, which incite no sense of belonging, are what Marc Augé calls ‘non-places’. For me, the disconnectedness we experience in these places is typified by the frozen dynamism of deserted, highly illuminated spaces at night.

Transitions

The impetus for my latest project, ‘Transitions’, was a desire to highlight the way advertising affects our public spaces. By setting the exposure time to be the same as the duration of the transition between two sliding adverts, I was able to create these ghostly, abstract surfaces. 

I like to focus on the urban landscape at night because of the way darkness filters out irrelevant details so that places become merely abstract things. I am interested in the disconnectedness we experience in these highly illuminated places which is at odds with the expansion of communications technologies.