An International Archive
Taken over a month-long journey, the photographs are a visual engagement with the immediate surroundings, noticing subtle moments in the ordinary. Observing traces of everyday life, the camera’s frame was used as a tool to record happenstances. Led by accidental arrangements left behind by the passer-by it becomes an interaction with a stranger and reflects ephemeral moments of chance encounters.
— Christina Evans, Winchester, England
During the course of my photographic career I have been continuously invested in considering the cultural landscape as a mitigating agent for identity. These curiosities grow out of a wide range of experiences; from growing up in suburban Houston, Texas to the time I spent living in Nairobi, Kenya.
This experience of culture shock engaged my sense of place and sparked my affinity for landscape. I have been captivated by the reciprocal and symbiotic relationship between geographic place defining individuals and individuals defining a place.
I am most interested in the geography of sprawl. The methods used to settle the new frontier of virgin land found on the outskirts of existing development mark and give identity to that landscape. These places of perpetual flux are the result of an everlasting desire for the new yet at the same time demonstrate the unfaltering need for contemporary civilizations to tame and control the space of habitation. Most recently I have been committed to making photographs that explore the suburban state of mind through the activities and lifestyle experienced by those of us who dwell there.
Through my photographic practice I am contributing to a greater understanding of the contemporary landscape, culture, and identity by creating images that both describe and inquire about the physical, sociological, and psychological geography of American space. My work reveals moments in time and place that are intimate and public, specific yet universal. I visually expose the space between reality and desire; explore the distance between the future and the present, and position poetic banality within the realm of unfamiliar beauty.
— Matthew Evans Golden, Denton, Texas, USA
This work is from an on-going project, coincidence, which joins narrative photographs made in urban environments with landscape images that show little or no evidence of any human activity. Each pair consists of two images that interact to create a linkage of time and space, of artificial and natural, perceived and not perceived, suggesting that whatever circumstances are apparent in the moment are just tiny fragments of an infinite and timeless universe.
These diptychs evolved out of an attempt to resolve the difference in my mind between the two major branches in my work. I felt that I was seeing landscapes and the urban environment from different perspectives and concluded that the way I understand was being fundamentally changed by where I happened to be. Until that point it seemed natural to group these bodies of work separately, but I was troubled by the feeling that there was something missing from both groups. Although they seemed complete logically they fell short of expressing something crucial that I wanted to remember: that it is important to keep in mind that what is happening in our consciousness is mostly illusionary. I don’t know if they succeed in doing that, but they do create some interesting tensions and interactions that speak to the fascinatingly paradoxical nature of photography.
What is important to me is the way that the images interact to undermine each other’s context. You could say that the “content” of each pair is the invisible line where they meet.
— David Evans, Mission, British Columbia, Canada