Carwash
I find myself drawn to carwashes. I suppose that even as a child I had some kind of mild fascination with them. I would enjoy it when my mother would take the time to go through a carwash after filling up at the local service station. When I was older and had my first car, I would often seek them out myself as a sort of ritual, as part of the American tradition of owning a car.
The first photographs that I took in the carwash series happened while I was sitting in a carwash, waiting for the different cycles to come to an end so I could just be on my way. As a captured audience, I watched as the fading light of sunset played with the splashes of water on my windshield. In that moment, I felt inspired to pick up my camera and begin to photograph these natural elements come together in a very artificial setting. I use the carwash as a means to demonstrate a subtext of mood, attitude, and general feeling that the varying colors, shapes, lights and movement that this structure creates, that I could not necessarily reproduce on my own.
It is important to me to demonstrate beauty in something that is perceived by society as mundane. These images challenge an individual’s perception of what is seen everyday by transforming them into something else completely. I want to show that there are phantasmal characteristics of being, beyond the conventional surface of such structures. By photographing these images within a carwash from an emotional perspective, I am capturing a visual reality that normally would go unobserved.