Chelsea through a Small Lens
As a expatriot New Yorker I often feel a pronounced disassociation when I return home. Neighborhoods evolve, landmarks disappear, buildings are razed, new ones aspire, and I continue to sag and age and gape. My memory is challenged by the new, my vision tested, but my heart is perplexed. What I had hoped to find on my visit no longer existed, in it’s place buildings and objects I had no connection to, no reference. I walked down the street with in a bubble, disconnected and tone deaf. In this set of iphone images I tried to capture that feeling, the feeling of viewing the world while wrapped in plastic.
I chose these images, noisy and pixelated and of questionable quality, because they show my disconnectedness to the subjects. I am an observer, an outsider, an interloper alone in a tide of the same. As disconnectedness seems to be the latest new black.
As I reviewed the pictures at home I had pangs of disappointment: Why hadn’t I used a better camera? Why did I have to crop these? Why couldn’t I have gotten a few feet closer? Is there anyway to print these? But then I remembered the wise words of an often unwise teacher: never fall in love with your work.
This gave me space to move on and find the next glittering city by the sea as I am never far from the ruin of a memory.