We need to talk about Time Geography.
Basically, it's the idea that people move through places, throughout time, interacting and intersecting in ways that are all at once profound, measurable and yet also completely imperceptible. As far as I'm concerned, it's the closest you'll ever find to a Grand Unifying Theory of Everything. It's something so powerful to me that I even named an artwork after it: {link: time-geography-dallas-after-dark}}
So, imagine you're reading this on some sort of electrical device. Far-fetched, I know. But that device was made in a factory probably thousands of miles away from where you're standing.
Have you ever thought for ten seconds just about the ship that it came here on?
- The people who were piloting the ship? Who trained them?
- The people who made the navigation instruments that they used? Who invented them?
- The people who made the ship itself? Who forged the steel they used?
- The administrative team that handle the accounting, and legal, and marketing efforts for the shipping company?
I mean, we're talking thousands of people, all who have lives outside the ship that brought you the thing that you're using to read the thing I wrote.
Think about the fact that each of THOSE people only exist because two OTHER people happened to meet and like each other enough to create a human about it, plus the teachers and doctors and community who shaped them. It's ... kind of endless. And it runs on intersection.
This may seem like a really broad and open-ended way to start a blog post about why I take pictures of stuff, but if you stop thinking about who made the camera in my pocket (and who made the people who made the camera), then you can start to apply it to the people who made the things in front of the camera, and why.
Why things are the way that they are today (including you and me) is a million, billion acts of self-expression dating back generations.
And so when I take a photo of a torn poster on an electrical box, I'm actually taking a photo of the intersection of everything that led to me being in that place, at that time, with that camera, seeing the remnants of things that multiple people placed on something else, years apart from when it was made and installed.
This photo was taken in a park in Montevideo, and has yet to be implemented into a piece. Who knows if it ever will be? It certainly has potential.