Here are more images from my ongoing project based in Overland Park KS.
My on-going project about Overland Park, KS has been my photographic playground since I moved here a few years ago and it has been the source of great inspiration and also personal insight. The "Over-Land Park" has become both a window and a mirror, where I have discovered as much about America as I have about myself and my photographic vision. It is where both place and self are slowly becoming one. The objective gravity of my original and now sober statement about this city is dissolving. This is something which leaves me enlightened and confused equally, every time I leave my home (or not) to photograph it.
Original Artists Statement:
Overland Park has been consistently ranked in the top 10 best cities to live in the United States, by CNN/Money magazine. Additionally, the city was ranked one of the ‘best places to raise your kids’ and also ranked 3rd for ‘America’s 10 best places to grow up’. As a photographer this news comes as an inspiration and something of a shock to me and I have decided to explore what it is that gives Overland Park this status.
To see previous Overland Park posts (of which there are 16, with many other single images scattered throughout this blog) please use the 'search' at the top left of this page.
Below I have decided to share a really interesting text which was sent to me by Philip Heying, this morning.
ReplyDelete"Our attention is responsive to the world. There are certain kinds of attention which are naturally called forth by certain kinds of object. We pay a different sort of attention to a dying man from the sort of attention we'd pay to a sunset or a carburettor. However, the process is reciprocal. It is not just that what we find determines the nature of the attention we accord to it, but the attention we pay to anything also determines what it is we find. In special circumstances, the dying man may become for a pathologist a textbook of disease, or for a photojournalist a 'shot,' both in the sense of a frozen visual moment and a round of ammunition in a campaign. Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it, and in what way. The fact that a place is special to some because of its great peace and beauty may, by that very fact, make it for another a resource to exploit, in such a way that its peace and beauty are destroyed. Attention has consequences.
One way of putting this is to say that we neither discover and objective reality nor invent a subjective reality, but that there is a process of responsive evocation, the world 'calling forth' something in me that in turn 'calls forth' something in the world. That is true of perceptual qualities, not just of values. If there is no 'real' mountain, for example, separate from the one created by the hopes, aspirations, reverence or greed of those who approach it, it is equally true that its greeness, or greyness, or stoniness lies not in the mountain or in my mind, but comes from between us, called forth from each and equally dependent on both; as music arises from neither the piano nor the pianist's hands, the sculpture from neither from hand nor stone, but from their coming together. And then the hands are part of the lived body -or, put more conventionally, are the vehicle of the mind, which is in turn the product of all the other minds that have interacted with it, from Beethoven and Michelangelo down to every encounter of our daily lives. We are transmitters, not originators."
Iain McGilchrist, "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World"