UTOPIA

“Utopia/Eutopia” explores the built environment and how the passage of time can alter perceptions and sense of place. The built environment engenders different emotional responses and reactions in everybody; the polarities of aesthetic/tasteless, beautiful/ugly, creative/soulless, history and the tradition/obsolete and archaic, up-to date and progressive/old fashioned and backward, etc. I want to explore these conflicting emotions elicited by the built environment through the medium of photography.The contemporary notion of being “sustainable” is juxtaposed with a hunger for the latest technologies. When they are constructed, new developments (housing,commercial, civic spaces) promise many positive attributes (conveniences, jobs,shelter). However, while with the passing of time their original intentions are often forgotten or obscured, the built environment unambiguously stands for everyone to see and judge, and cannot be hidden out of sight and out of mind. The quick turnaround in what’s valued within the contemporary context and what comes to be despised in the future will be explored within this project. My photography for this project is largely void of any human presence. By doing so it allows the subject to be shown in its raw form, not lost in the hype and/or dreams of those for whom it is designed or sold to. The photographic exploration of the built environment within these parameters provides connection to everyday spaces, and in doing so provides individuals with deeper emotional connections to, and sense of, place, in all their many guises