Photo Series: The Ordinary and Extraordinary in the Everyday
Photography
This photo series is a scattering of the ‘ordinary and extraordinary’ happenings throughout my everyday life in Austin, Texas It is also my first sustained attempt at photography.
1. Friends
This is my friend Anam in her Austin, Texas apartment. We picked an 'ordinary' Saturday afternoon and decided to shoot some photos together.
2. Public Events
These are photos from events I attended one Saturday in Austin. Austin is the city of live music, social justice, and ‘weird.’ While there have been many beautiful moments, a lot of it feels a tad contrived. Also, as a minority, a lot of it feels white. This Saturday I attended a Falastein public concert in the afternoon and a live music set at a ketamine clinic in the evening, checking the boxes of social justice and ‘weird’. Suffice to say, from the Twitter-activist to the neo-hippie, I got a taste of every flavor of performative white person that weekend as well.
3. Everyday Object
Turning more closely to the interior, I photograph my apartment, giving it the most artistic glow I can. I focus in on one object in particular. This year has been a reckoning of the idea of ‘home.’ Taking some time to look deeply at something from someone who loves me dearly and who I love as well was a gift.
4. Domestic Space: Boundaries
Here, I think about my domestic space. My domestic space is not merely the four walls that contain my ancient living room couch, my memory foam pillow, or my kitchen cutlery. In my apartment complex, the domestic space includes indoor chairs on the balcony, conversations seeping out of the rarely closed windows, and often even extending to the music on the nearest concrete stairwell. Basically what I’m trying to say is that living in this neighborhood expanded my conception of counts as ‘domestic.’ The physical boundaries of my apartment seem less important than the connections between people for the cultivation of the ‘domestic’ and the larger creation of the ‘home’. Domestic space is not a static, harshly bounded container of the home-sphere. It is, instead, the people, spaces, and world(s) to which a home is connected. Hence, blurry, semi-see-through doors.
Yet, all of this felt a little contrived. A lot of on-the-nose philosophizing which I don’t think most people would really care for. If I showed these pictures to the average person, I don’t think anyone would be clamouring to say, ‘Ahhh, home sweet home'.“ Hence, I reveal behind-the-scenes photo set-up which included some tricky mirror work.
I can feel myself getting more experimental (pretentious?) — I don’t know if I like it but it is probably good for me to be thinking in new ways like this.
5. Domestic Space: Motion
If my domestic space is more than whatever is between the four walls — if it includes the connections to others who pass through the space — then what is it for me specifically? I can say that it is motion. This incorporates not only the physicality of the space but also the people, activities, and connections that take place in and through the space.
Concretely, one of the big things that happens in my apartment — something that really makes it feel like a domestic space — are Wednesday nights. Through the local church that I attended, I work and play (mostly play) with some kids in my neighborhood every Wednesday evening. The sacraments taken here are pepperoni pizza slices and children’s juice pouches, but this is a kind of communion too. For their privacy and mine, I do not include direct photos of the children but try to capture the energy, motion, and chaos generated by their presence. My domestic space is the people and motion that our mutual connection brings.
Like I said, getting pretentious…
6. Public Space
If my domestic space is connected to the outside world, then it is necessary to see what’s out there. My space is not the single node in a web of relations, but the lines between — my connection to others and my space’s connection to other spaces. My apartment complex is one of the most lively places I’ve ever been, but I am still getting comfortable photographing people who I don’t know. I also work very odd hours being and academic, so sometimes I get home between the chaos and there are moments of stillness and silence.
This is Casa Hills apartment complex. This is where I live. The Casa Hills apartment complex in the St Johns neighborhood of Austin, Texas. I am trying to make it Home. How you frame this neighborhood is how you will see it. That you frame it –with intention – already begins an irreversible transmutation. Each moment of looking can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, the mundane into the magical.
This has all been quite preliminary and increasingly theoretical/experimental but it has opened a lot of doors for more photographic exploration to come. All this to say:
interconnected circuits my neighborhood made symbol
electrical current a pale shadow
of the thrumming web of life
that is Casa Hills
... but so too, do I walk under the umbrage of a thousand powerlines
6. Routes and Routinization
My everyday is composed not just of the not-so-static spaces I call home or my neighborhood, but also of the routes I take to get between places. The way we move, where we come from and go to, and why we take the routes we take, all contribute to our routinization.
In more practical terms, your commute — especially when you’re in the car-topia that is Texas — is a huge part of your everyday reality. It impacts your body, your mind, your practices, and your soul. To understand me, I must look closely at my routes.
Since coming to Texas I have rarely walked outside of designated walking areas: parks, trails, campus, etc. Yet this does not mean I do not have routes that serve to socialize me -- my car-bound wayfaring is no less prominent than walking.
Because of the management at my apartment complex, I still do not have a parking spot. They have been ‘processing’ my paperwork since August. After many failed attempts I have given up and park on the street. On my street, Reagan Hill, I almost inevitably drive over crushed glass Modelo bottles and loads of other small debris. More often than not, though, I park across the street on Radcliff, crossing a few lanes of traffic to get back home.
That is the context for my path. I look here at the act of walking, the act of driving, the place where all of this happens, and the symbols necessary to have a route. I have, with the placement, attempted to capture some sense of rhythm.
The path I take to get anywhere begins with my shoes. Shoes become a metonym for walking. The means I take to get anywhere in Texas involves my tires. Tire becomes a metonym for driving. As I drive and walk, foot on floor or foot on gas, driving becomes a metonym for route and route becomes a synecdoche for wider routinization.
To Be Continued…
What I’ve captured here are people making the public space their own…
… a secret breath
on a balcony or a sunset stroll
I park on the street where these photos were taken and walk through the parking lot pictured every single day in order to get home. Sometimes I get home early, others I get home late. Regardless, I walk under the umbrage of a barbed wire fence…