Depressive Landscapes

When in 2004 I started taking pictures for this series, Marc Auget and his book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity was in my mind. I had been shooting subjects related to changing landscape, the development of modern urban conglomerations and the human condition for a while now but this time was different. I just hadn’t realised it yet. The concept of non-place has been the subject of several sociological studies in order to understand the changes of man’s relationship with the surrounding environment and how this affects the way people relate to and interact with their peers. That wasn’t the true focus on the pictures and yet I was still to discover the true motivations for my pursuit and what exactly I was trying to capture in these landscapes. Throughout the following years, I continued to search for and photograph non-places but slowly started to realise that my interest didn’t lie solely within the subjects in the frame. In January 2008 I shot the last photograph for the series, a lot had happened in the previous year and I had now realised that all that time I was trying to capture images with which I connected, images that would trigger an array of emotions within me. For the first time, I wasn’t particularly worried about other people’s reactions to the pictures, providing that they meant something to me it was fair game. When I was out photographing this work, I had no one to look for, to talk to or to please. No one but myself. By the time the editing process started I had a clear idea of what I wanted to say with the pictures and so grouping them in sets of three allowed for all the small stories that I had constructed, witnessed and lived to come together and add to the main narrative that is Depressive Landscapes. The book Depressive Landscapes was published in June 2012 on AR books.