Settling for the Unsettling

As a photographer, I trust my images to speak for themselves individually. Yet I thought that a few words by way of introduction might make these several photographs gathered here more intelligible collectively, especially given my puzzling title for this series. Most viewers will note that these examples seem lacking in “subject matter,” which is generally understood as what the pictures are “about.” In particular, there are no other people present to intervene between the photographer and the viewer. Nothing much else seems here either: brick buildings, empty lots, asphalt streets. Such is the more or less forgotten side of a small Southern city.

This series began as an attempt to document and understand life in a place new to me. I walked the streets and alleys of my new home town looking for signs of life I could now record and come to know. On my walks, especially on the weekends, I was struck by how alone I was in contrast to the larger city I had just left. Perhaps this is why I began to look for moments of meaning, traces of the people who lived here now or even in the past. This small city had the same housing developments and strip malls as anywhere else, but I was attracted to the places no one else looked at by choice, because they were not generally considered worth looking at by most.

My realization runs counter to the idea of photography as a means to record what it is important—people, places, and times we want to remember. I was documenting what had been intentionally left behind and eventually forgotten. At first, my training and work habits inclined me to consider composition, light, and focus. So I began to match my methods to my matter. To capture that nothing, I did nothing special with my basic point and shoot camera technique. At first this was unsettling to me, a one-time professional photographer and now a professor of photography, as unsettling as those abandoned buildings, vacant lots, and empty sidewalks. Then I settled for the unsettling.

Editor’s note: All images reproduced with permission of the photographer, Bradley Phillips