Thursday, December 4, 2008

Matt Nighswander


- I really enjoy Matt Nighswander's series Chicagoland, "When I first moved to Chicago, I was slightly confused by the term "Chicagoland." I heard it used in TV and radio ads when I wasn't quite paying attention and I wondered initially if it might be an amusement park or an enormous mall. I've chosen "chicagoland" for the working title of my project not because I am interested in documenting the wide expanse of the Chicago metro region (in fact, the vast majority of these pictures were all shot within Chicago’s city limits) but because of the psychological space the word implies to me. The pictures were taken in Chicago, but the best ones seem only loosely tethered to the reality from which they spring. If they are about sprawl and the forlorn spaces of generic architecture it is at least partly because these spaces are where the transformative powers of photography can have the greatest effect; where the photographic image can create a sense of drama and psychological tension that may not have been present in the original scene." See more of his work here.



© Matt Nighswander

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