There are generic (landscape) images that identify and define a specific place, time or culture, by monument, event or sign, and those that function as ‘anywhere’, by lack of those identifying features.

I tend to work with the second kind of image, although I am aware that they exist by default or as a residue of the first: postcard views, touristic images and clichés designate a background, peripheral or unnamed image as meaningless. And so a generic identifying image limits how much we see.

A photographic archive, despite its historical relevance or what it reveals about a time or place, can be seen as any generic set of images and creates a specific way of looking. This historical/indexical sight generates a kind of blindness to the material reality and visual character of an image. It creates a priority: there are certain views worth seeing and specific ways of framing a monument, place, person or landscape. This is a kind of closed and controlled vision. 

What occurs is a reduction in sensation and experience, and the emergence of a centre and periphery through framed views that produce a sense of nowhere by default. This nowhere, background, absence, irrelevant site, after-event or un-identifying generic image, is what I am interested in working with: a site to reclaim sight.