2 posts tagged “empty lot”

Here is another of my empty lot series. Done by photographing the ground by using a grid - there are 100 photos total that comprise the whole "landscape."

When I first began to take pictures I was using the camera as a visual record for my life. To capture the beauty and strange ephemeral moments that I couldn't possess with writing or conversation. Eventually I stopped taking the camera out during these intimate experiences and I began to think more consciously about subject matter. Gradually people were no longer in my photographs at all and I found that my focus shifted to the built environment. Consistently my photographs were of spaces that were no longer inhabited by people. I ventured out to find abandoned buildings, empty lots, or any kind of material structure that had the marks of decay. It has always been easy to recognize these states of dormancy, especially through our avoidance of them. They are in the periphery but empty spaces are easily conspicuous against the compact development of the city, striking me as pauses, or punctuation marks in the dense sentences and paragraphs of the streets and boulevards in the urban novel.

The emptiness and vacancy of them were always attractive to me because of the stillness and silence that contradicted the eagerness of more active spaces, the spaces where my daily activities took place. The abandoned buildings were evocative of things that the world had left behind and would eventually be built over and regenerated to be active and functional again. Reminding me, the buildings I inhabit now were once an empty lot, and could possibly be demolished in the future.

I started to think about how these spaces were usually avoided because of their dysfunction. How easy it was to let physical structures deteriorate and that our buildings need constant maintenance. That the slowing or masking processes of decay are linked very closely to those daily activities of cleaning we do every day, or those monthly repairs we must make on our roofs, or walls. These spaces are as fenced off and guarded as well or better than most active buildings. Which was unusual to me because there was nothing really to protect, rather the fortresses were to keep people out from coming in. It was also common to find these states of decay more frequently in impoverished areas of the city, and how differently they were groomed in more affluent areas. These ideas stem from two bodies of work, The Last Common Denominator and Passages. I am continuing to think about these ideas visually with other projects with mapping empty lots. The projects and sites of which are still in development.

One of my other interests is in billboards. Especially in billboards with metal frames. I included a billboard in The Last Common Denominator based on some billboards I saw in Chicago, the faces of which were decaying. It is very typical to find billboards situated in empty lots. Which was an interesting juxtaposition to me because they demand a very obvious suspension of disbelief. The viewer, (which is usually a driver) is asked to not notice the fact that the billboard is located in a vacant dysfunctional space. The lot could be filled with detritus or trash, which I have found are mostly shoes, clothing, liquor bottles and various other domestic trash, furniture, wheels, car parts etc. All of which when categorized are fashion, alcohol, the automobile industry and the domestic realm and which dominate the billboard market. In addition to my interests of billboards in empty lots are empty billboards, billboards with no advertisement, or in which the advertisement is deteriorating. This is metaphorical to me of a state of emptiness as our identity as consumers. That our relationships to people are often through what goods we acquire. We often define ourselves through our possessions, our toys. A billboard which has no message, no goal, no pointer-- "want this", "buy this", "be this" is a failed signifier. As a consumer we can not pit ourselves for it or against it. Our choice of purchase (consumer) power is taken away, therefore we are at a loss.

These states that I concentrate on, they could easily be seen as failures, or temporary states of anarchy or chaos, or loss, or entropy, associations which are usually negative. Ugliness made pretty, the feeling of which I think is most evoked in Passages. However, I find these sites to be relieving from all of the organization and constant desire to control that runs most of the world. I think of them as vagrant sites. Deviant in their non-function, non-use but to me reminders of how consciously the environment is built, torn down and rebuilt. A reminder the space I inhabit was conceived from an empty lot of some sort. A square of open space that is designated somewhere on a city map as an available lot for property, but in the day to day, a plain, an opening, a temporary wilderness in the urban miasma. And a reminder to me that the predilection for control is not always a "superior" drive.

After living for three years in the mid-west, I have found that what once was an ugly, grey and flat suburban obtuseness is now a dynamic interaction between different coordinates of urban density. The rigidness of the grid imposed on me in Chicago was not as satisfying and all too easily redundant than the sporadic geography of Los Angeles. I used to think that Chicago and New York were "real" cities because of their centrally located hierarchy. But I no longer think that that model of the city is the "superior" one. My return to LA has allowed for a rejuvenating visual perception. I have to sit back and look at the landscape (as though I were a tourist), in addition to my moving in between my house and the freeways. This has led to the beginning of a new project which I call Topiary. So far this has involved my going out and photographing individually those trees and bushes which decorate our city streets. Especially ones that are manicured to be the same height, shape and form, or are repeatedly found in different areas of the city. Bringing attention to what I call the natural decoration of the built environment, or what would be professionally termed, landscape architecture. Those trees were someone's conception of what the natural beauty is. Which is quite odd, seeing as they are usually trimmed to be geometric essential shapes and are contained in special containers which vary from plain, to ornate depending what sector of the city you are in, or are grown in concrete cut outs on the sidewalk. And they are almost always very simply shaped green trees, which is more closely related to a six year olds drawing of a tree, rather than a reflection of the variety of trees that could be planted.

For me, this visual exercise is the start of a kind of deconstruction of the social landscape. For now I am using photography as a tool, to look at those parts and pieces which make up our architecture, which will also recall those things that were left out.

I have found what once was an artistic reaction to the world has taken me to many other levels of discourse on geography, archaeology, history, architecture, social theory. Artistic academia if you will. What once was a largely egocentric reactionary participation with the world has turned to an active engagement with looking and thinking about the way things are and the way things could be. Of course looking and thinking at the way things are is all about perception, and that in itself is slippery. For now I just have photographs, posted on the web, which also concentrate your view on what I perceive as interesting in the world. Eventually with all of the meshing of technologies, I will be able to render those ideas more adequately as my access to different sort of toys changes.

I had always had romantic and religious notions of the world. Not really understanding that the beautiful experience I was having sitting underneath a tree at a park, my divulging in the natural was at one time planned and the bench underneath that tree near that water fountain was consciously ordered. That someone made a choice to structure that place and designate that city block as a park.

The ordering and structuring of the city is going to largely predetermine how I move through it, how I experience the world. If language orders our experience, our consciousness and way of being in the world, this linguistic (ordering) is inherently built into the systems of our environment and therefore even more strongly coordinate and render our experience. The workings of real estate, architecture and urban planning are much slower to change than language. Inherent in the physical nature of the materials themselves in addition, the bureaucracy, traditions and negotiations behind those structures are even slower to change. It will take years before our social architecture reflects the new relationships that we foster with the personal computer. And before our social architecture could possibly reflect the type of non-linear and interactive systems of the web. The concept of interaction, a premise based on the prioritization of the consumer interfacing with software, will lend itself to radically different social architectures. And will premeditate how we interact with our world in entirely new ways, hopefully prioritizing the integration physical and conceptual activities (virtual reality) over the old economic models which secularized spaces of home, work, play and public.