stories to be written

I like to take long walks in Chicago, the city in which I live. Even though I’ve walked the same streets many times there are always new things to see. Not new big-picture things, but little things – a discarded face mask, a lost toy, a striking shadow. Each of these little things has a story to tell. In the series “Stories to be Written” objects discovered by chance in Chicago are shown in their found context – the ground on which they rest and the towering environment around them. Their unwritten stories are like latent images waiting to be developed with the experience and bias of the viewer.

Each image has been made by combining two photographs taken from one spot, the place where the object was found. At each location I have chosen to look vertically straight-up and then straight-down. In the digital darkroom the two photographs are combined. Somehow our brains are able to disentangle these mixed up-down composite views and interpret the results. The Cubist painters understood our ability to do this when they constructed canvasses that showed multiple views of a subject. The merged up-down images in the present series can be thought of as the inverse of these Cubist paintings. Instead of looking at a fixed point from multiple directions we are looking outwards from a fixed point in two directions. The merged up-down images are perhaps relatively easy for us to interpret because we have strong expectations for what things should be up and what should be on the ground, and in sorting this out we begin to write our version of the unwritten story.