Michele Turre

ARTISTS STATEMENT

 

I most often point my camera at the most ordinary of things.

Much of my work explores how we live in our local surroundings. Unless I'm on a special assignment, I shoot where I happen to be, which usually means the back roads of Western Massachusetts.

While "landscape" has been a persistent theme in my work, the images I make are more studies of the human connection to "place" than they are conventional landscapes. Scenic views hold far less interest for me than "non-places" or "in between" places. I'm most drawn to documenting the temporary, the neglected, the overlooked.

Perhaps what most engages me about photography is it's relation to time. Snapping a photo interrupts temporality. It can hook you into nostalgia, remorse, or longing. It can remove you to scales of time outside of the experience of an individual human: intergenerational, historical, geological.

If pressed to categorize my work, I suppose I would say that my practice falls within a number of contemporary visual traditions, including new documentary and personal journalistic narrative, along with a taste of conceptual art.

Web and book design have been of growing interest for me over the past ten years, to the point where I would be as likely to be found on a Saturday afternoon reading Communication Arts or Nest magazine (RIP) as Art Forum or Geoffrey Batchen's latest commentary on photography.

MT
April, 2005