Photographs
from the
Rhode Island Photographic Survey
The photographs on these pages are drawn from my ongoing work for the Rhode Island Photographic Survey. Consistent with the mission of the survey to utilize and question the documentary aspects of the photographic medium, this work also demonstrates my specific interests. Interests which include: sites of local unimportance, simple structures, signage of all types, evidence of personal expression, and locales in all manner of flux and flow.
Our state and its environs continue to be transformed, sometimes at an alarming rate. The public realm, increasingly under corporate sponsorship in some areas, sprouts with chaotic energy and activity in others, and everywhere places are bent to the needs of the automobile. Sites of accomplishment and pride become ruins and these ruins are in turn discovered within a frontier wilderness, waiting to again be tamed and “civilized.” This is the sphere of the survey.
Our colleagues Erik Carlson and Erica Carpenter wrote the following about the project:
"Streets, intersections, parking lots—our environment is filled with such intermediary spaces that have been determined by the pervasiveness of our automobile-based culture. Though often ill-planned on the human scale, these spaces are designed by human necessity—the need to accommodate habit, movement, and volume—and decorated by accident, accumulation or neglect.
Most thoroughfares are a jumble of signs vying for attention, a scatter of information that we pass through on the way to other places. Only occasionally do we stop to notice their details, generally with impatience at a red light or traffic bottleneck, shortly before reaching for the horn.
Still, what separates one road from the next is the meaning we give to signs and landmarks encountered along the way. All thoroughfares are known by their intersections, social as well as spatial.
These photos reveal the living aspect of our discarded places, those sites that we see without seeing in the course of daily movement. Suddenly, in someone’s backwoods riff on the urban parking shed, in the weather-worn eulogies of a roadside memorial, in the collective dialect of one streets composite of signs, we find more than we bargained for. Charismatic juxtapositions, unintended typologies, and the embellishments of eccentric personal detail reveal that these spaces are not lost in our landscape but very much a part of it.
We’ve claimed them as our own."
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