I have been photographing liminal spaces, those that are neither here nor there, that exist on the threshold between one place and another, for many years in this ongoing project. These spaces seem to represent an abandonment of the plan to create a real place, an improvement of the environment. It is as if architects, designers, developers, urban planners said, “let us build to here, but no further.” Thus, these are often non-places (“utopias,” based on the Greek derivation of the word, “no place”) that come into existence at the edge of a designed space.
These spaces exclude those not meant to be on the inside, they display a lack of care for those on the outside, a negligence of beauty and nature. Often these spaces are industrial or commercial in nature or have been abandoned and left to the elements. They expose a glimpse of what was designed with purpose, to improve, but hide it behind the façade of indifference, abandonment and ugliness.
There is another aspect to these images that I am trying to capture and that is how they are often open and empty spaces. They are not built to human scale but neither do they expose us to the grandeur of nature. They seem to enclose nature and yet they leave it bare, void or springing from the cracks.
If Thomas More’s “no place” (οὐ τόπος) was meant to be a “good place,” (εὖ τόπος) these images remind us how the human perversion of the good so often leads to the banality of ugliness. At the same time, I strive to make images that are, in fact, beautiful to look at. The viewer should not feel the need to turn away from these images but desire to explore them more deeply and the ironic textual elements in so many of them should encourage this.
Click any image to see them all enlarged.
