for the little boy who lives down the lane

When I’m taking photos I feel like a little boy again, seeing things for the first time.

I love the cobbled lanes of Brunswick, the inbetween spaces that are difficult to walk along. It’s an altered state.

The artist Robert Irwin says that “seeing is the forgetting of the name of the thing one sees”.  How do we do that? How can we see the world afresh?

My photos suggest the experience we sometimes have of everyday things around us suddenly seeming unreal, particularly when we look at them from a different perspective. The feeling of not recognizing the everyday is known as jamais vu, meaning “never seen”, the opposite of deja vu.

Jamais vu is an altered state experienced by people in the moments before a seizure or migraine. It’s also a state of mind that artists adopt to really see the world, without their minds telling them what they should be seeing.

streetbrunswick 2024