Fundamental Jelly

Of the many things I love about photography, I am absolutely in love with the ambiguity the medium offers to photographers.  While I have worked in various different genres in photography, I have always been personally drawn to the mundane and trivial things surrounding our lives.  For me there is no poor subject matter, everything is worth looking at, everything has its own individual visual reality.  There is a pictorial logic in this form even if it appears to be drained of context at first sight. 

This type of photography is certainly not something I came up with; this subgenre has been pioneered by the likes of William Christenberry, William Eggleston, Saul Leiter, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander just to name a few.  Critics have called it boring and ’snapshot chic,’ but I feel otherwise.  I am not talking about visual abstractions; I am talking about things and scenes we are all familiar with.  So, is there beauty in the banal, is there visual poetry in the mundane, is there an elevation of the utterly prosaic?  Of course, I say YES.  I shot these photographs in and around my home last night. 

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Images by Robert J