A Second Look

Months have passed since I started shooting “The Grand Street Project”. It began by me being fascinated by all the different kinds of disposed objects I would see on my way to and from the subway.It evolved in having surgical gloves and plastic bags in my pockets for weeks and my room smelling like rotten food and cigarettes. I ended up shooting 88 images against a white background and edited them down to 19 finals that are on my website now.I did regret the decision to shoot film many times. It is amazing how easy it is to forget how much more effort we had to put into that process. There is the way to the lab, the extra cost, the scanning and taking the dust and scratches of the scanned images. After all that work you are basically where you would have been the moment you release the shutter on a digital camera.At the end it was worth it though and it is good to know that it is possible to scan the film to any desired size.Was there a message in this project? I’m not sure I was just inspired to shoot it but after looking at the images again the message could be that it is always worth to take a second look. Maybe what we see is not reality but the projection of our ideas and beliefs onto our surroundings.A piece of trash becomes beautiful even though we are trained to look down on it, despise it and disregard it. On the contrary things believed by society to be noble, desirable and valuable might be tremendously ugly when we give them a closer look.When we approach life with an open mind we might find beauty or ugliness where we had never expected it. :-)"A Second Look" Williamsburg/Brooklyn/Duct Tape/February 2009

Please check out my website at carstenfleck.com