project description
Paper in park, Volkspark Friedrichshain, Berlin, Germany, 2008
These images, from four different continents, Africa, Asia, Europe and America, detail a long term project that began in 1999. While rooted in cross-cultural identity and stemming from my experiences as a citizen, immigrant and traveller, in countries as far removed geographically as they are culturally, they speak in a common language about intimacy, attention and detail. As a photographer, I explore the familiar zones of home with the same interest and curiosity as I do the unknown, not so much defining a place, as circling the relationship between spaces, sign and self. A print, for all it's materiality, stands in the place of and points to something that is absent. I hint at that silent tension between absence and presence, those oblique and surprise perspectives that highlight the play between abstract and real forms. This shift of emphasis, from a window's view to the flowers inside that obscure it, a door to its shadow, a house to the foliage that shrouds it, extrudes attention to the periphery, the obstacles and the missing links. These are traces of traces, reality twice removed. They resonate and echo on an emotional, subconscious level, deceive us and tempt us like dreams and memories do.
