Projects: From "Here" to the "Edge"
Earlier this year I worked on a small book project entitled “Here and There”. It was a collection of square B&W images that I shot over the course of the last 2-3 years; a lot of them were taken during the pandemic while wandering around in the greater Southwestern Ohio area. When I shot the images I didn’t have a larger project in mind, but over time it became apparent I was working on a bit of a theme and then boom, the book was born. Thanks so much to all who purchased a copy due to my post on Instagram about it. I still have a few copies left, so if you are interested please email me.
Working on the book and curating the images to form pairs and tell a story was a lot of fun, and taught me a quite a bit about themes, while taking a hard look at my work. I enjoyed it so much that when it was finished, I immediately started thinking about what was next.
Since the completion of “Here and There”, I’ve been working on a new theme with work created specifically for the purpose of being a complete body of work for a book or show.
The working title for this new project is “Light at the Edge”.
“Light at the Edge” is about the light and scenes that are found during the early hours of 4am to 6am in urban places; on the edge of the next day’s beginning before people are out and moving about. Being in these spaces so early in the morning is surreal - I usually experience the duality of quiet calm and fear.
The quiet calm is due to the fact that most people are not even awake, and the city’s moving inhabitants at that time are the possums, raccoons, and cats. I can hear every rustled trashcan, every drip of water falling from downspouts, and the faint sound of windchimes. Its almost like I am hyper aware of everything.
The fear is because you never know what sort of people are actually out at that time of day. I have had a few run-ins with some seedy characters but so far nothing that I can’t handle. I think what helps a bit there is that I am a 6’1” male and I have an old film camera on a tripod. In general that means I’m large enough that someone doesn’t want to bother with me, and innocent enough since the camera says I’m just out taking images. That said, this isn’t a project that I’d recommend to others in any area of high-risk.
These scenes are devoid of people, but the light reveals the presence of them. My hope is that I’m giving the viewer just enough information to create their own narrative about the scene that is different than the next person based on their own thoughts and past experiences. Of course, nearly every image I’ve taken on this project actually does have a real backstory - like the house that for some reason had the smell of gasoline wafting from inside that was so strong I almost called the police, or the house where the couple was arguing at 4am about the phone bill, or the house where I could hear someone crying on the other side of the curtain. But I’m not adding any of that in. I’ll let the viewer create the story.
The gear I’m using for the project is intentionally simple – a Mamiya C220 6x6 medium format film camera with an 80mm f/2.8 lens which is considered a “normal” frame of view – ie, what you see with your own eyes with no aid. No zoom lenses, no way of getting into a scene other than just being there and observing from the sidewalk or street. The film of choice is Kodak Ektar, which does a wonderful job of rendering colors and is easy to work with in regards to reciprocity failure due to the necessary longer exposures caused by the low light.
That’s it for now – as the project progresses I’ll post some more here and share my thoughts on how things are going. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or are interested in learning more. Thanks!
Jeremy
