A way of seeing...

Daily Observations (D/O) is an ongoing photographic project that I’ve been working on for a number of years, going back to 2015, at least. I started it as a way to document various objects and scenes of interest that caught my eye during my walks around my home city of Philadelphia. Capturing fleeting moments of the residue of human activity in the built environment has always had an allure for me. I’ve always been one to take a moment to look closer at things that most people might pass by without blinking an eye. A flash of colored tape patching up a part of a door, a barely there random drawing on the sidewalk or remnants of graffiti that was partially buffed out but extended onto the adjacent surface are all things that can grab my attention as I’m looking around.

Often, it only takes a split second upon seeing something of interest for me to whip out my phone, snap a shot and keep going. A couple of my ‘rules’ with photographing anything that’s slated for D/O are: Always capture the scene as is and with no physical interference from me and don’t take more than three photos, at the most. With having done this for a while now, I can usually size up whether I have something good or not within a moment or two of spotting it. There have been times when I’ve passed up a scene only to turn around after a few yards to go back and shoot it. Other times, I’ve seen a great combination of objects, colors, textures and whatnot, but I couldn’t access the subject in a safe space to photograph it. In those cases, I just admire it and keep moving.

My D/O photos inform my paintings from the standpoint of being a kind of visual sketchbook. I look to them sometimes for ideas about combinations of shapes and colors that may assist me in figuring out a problem I’m experiencing in the painting. The photos stand on their own as a separate body of work. I’m thinking about possibly having some printed out, but I’m concerned about the quality since they’re all phone camera images. I’ll have to look deeper into this aspect.

Something else that I think about with documenting things on the street is the very ephemeral nature of everything that has a life outside, especially graffiti and other marks that appear and can disappear in the blink of an eye. I sometimes think about the life of objects like cast-off hair barrettes. What will happen to that objet the next time a person passes it? Will they get kicked or swept aside, accidentally contributing to another bit of unintentional art on the sidewalk? Who knows.

The mundane nature of these everyday scenes is attractive also because most of the time, I’m capturing something that’s along the way that I take to and from a store around where I life or the neighborhood around my studio, mostly. Even in these limited routines, enough happens that I can encounter a variety of changes in the environment even overnight. Graffiti may have been buffed, a storm might have altered a chalk drawing, construction might be starting on a building where yesterday, there wasn’t even scaffolding up. So much can change in a very short amount of time. All aspects of life are like this. Things change quickly, life is ephemeral. All aspects of it. I try to capture what I can and hope that the resulting image has enough interest for me to want to keep and use it.

For me, Daily Observations is more than just capturing a moment, it’s a way of seeing. It’s a way for me to pay attention to some of the smaller things. “Don’t sweat the small things” is an old saying meant to keep people focused on the larger issue(s) at hand. “Don’t get lost in the weeds” is another. These are meant for us tackling bigger issues. However, getting lost in noticing the small things around us is good for us, as well. It can lead to understanding some of the larger things in our lives and what’s going on around us, as well. We can see how certain things fit together that make up the larger tapestry.