Banality

The year I spent in Rochester, located on the banks of the River Medway in Southern UK, was a year that defined my photography process and my individual identity. Provoked by a lack of belongingness, this body of work represents the connection between time and memory conveyed through photography. What we call a memory is a representation of a time; with the fragments that our mind puts together, along with emotions that we felt. The foggy nights on the riverside always reminded me of being lost, confused, and uncertain of the shape that my photography practice was taking while I was working towards completing my MA Photography course.

The details in this set of images, much like my memory of Rochester, disappear into featureless shadows. They limit the viewer to seeing only what is offered; although, in my imagination, I always wander beyond the foreground into a distant place. It is through these quotidian and everyday scenes of Rochester that I try to explore what it meant for me to wander and to be discovered again.

On reducing the depth of the photograph the nature of the scene becomes unclear, and it creates a ‘tension’ in the image — that of not knowing ‘exactly’. The camera creates representations of reality that challenges interpretation and creates a psychic space, as Walter Benjamin said, by stripping places and objects of their banal obviousness. In ‘Banality’, I attempt to ask the viewer to seek beyond the obvious.