Ditches & Gutters: Plain View

One interesting aspect of working in the same medium over time is the emergence of repeating elements. For example, as we were curating images for our Ditches & Gutters project, Darwin noticed we each photographed in styles reminiscent of some of our early work. “Hey,” Darwin said at one point in our curation huddle. “These images are similar to your Small Town Sundays work!” Small Town Sundays is a print project we completed last year for Alberta’s Exposure photography festival. The project dealt with the dueling narratives of nostalgia and neglect surrounding dying prairie towns. Here’s a few images I took from this project. (Darwin elaborates more on how he is drawn to abstract patterns in the previous blog post.)

In a similar manner, I seemed to be ‘squaring off’ to my subject matter with Ditches & Gutters, frequently choosing a straight-on point of view without the use of dramatic dynamic angles. This is wholly unintentional! I wonder what thought processes were running through my subconscious. Is it because with both of these subjects, the subject matter is rather plain, even…homely? I mean, the first image in this post is essentially cow shit on a fence! There’s no getting around THAT subject matter, so might as well present it in a straightforward way! Or am I trying to make obvious that which we dismiss? The old crumbling building past its useful era, the water-bloated ditch that captures and funnels away roadside waste… Given my past efforts to teach students to look closer at the world, and move past their judgments of what is worthy of photographing, perhaps the answer is a combination of these thoughts. In any case, here’s some more plain view images of the wonderful world of ditches and gutters.