Introduction
“Banality,” which is the current photographic series that I have been working on, is a summation of my idea that all photography is a form of curating of all visual stimuli. Today we live within a world which is overloaded by the sheer volume of digital information. “Banality,” which has been influenced by color photography of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston as well as the seemingly objective photographs of the New Topographics movement and Olafur Eliasson, is a springboard for my hybrid of traditional documentary landscape photography with current technological advances, particularly involving aerial photography, Google Street View, Google Earth, and Mapquest. This series manifests my search for a Zen-like simplicity and harmony within a particular scene that I discover within the disjointed narrative of our everyday lives.
Also, “Banality” reflects my fascination with the idea of an establishing shot from a cinematic perspective as well as the concept of surveillance of public/private lands. The viewpoint of my photographs tend to be a long shot or extreme long shot that looks at the relationship of the subject with its surroundings. Sometimes the subject may be a factory in a foreign country such as Taiwan or a group of young people at a beach. The illusion of mundanity and randomness of the scenery belies my interest in stark existentialism and humanity’s disconnection from nature and even the urban landscape. The camera angle and desaturated colors emphasize the artist’s illusory objectiveness and scientific eye which are an antithesis to the oversaturated palette of current Hollywood films.
