Somewhere, and In Place

Placelessness is created through the over-organization and compartmentalization of our shared surroundings. It is when everywhere all starts to look the same, the same parking lots, the same store fronts, the same manufactured locations that exist seemingly in all common places we visit. These spaces are mediated by the labels we adhere to them: “grocery store”, “gas station”, “office building”, all universally mean the same places despite the difference in locations. In our modern lives, we need locations of utility, ways to separate them, and all the straight lines and boundaries that define those. This often leads us to manifest these nowhere-places that are made up of the functions of daily life. So many of these are defined by transitory non-locations that are necessary additions to the places we use, but they are places that pass out of our awareness almost immediately. These photographs explore the line between placefulness and the placeless in the manmade landscape. This is where oddness and awkwardness exist because of the coalescence of a menagerie of uninvolved components. Here, where the intersections of place architypes create unique locations in space. These singular aspects of placelessness transition into a kind unique location, and that uniqueness is the definition of placefulness. The nature of this transition of place is studied through the documentation of our common areas, with an emphasis on formal relationships, and the plastic existence of them on the picture plane. The result of this spatial conflict, creates a feeling of being foreign in familiar contexts.