Daryl Thetford

It is said that in photographing the world we are no longer looking at the world, but rather the world photographed. I find that this is never truer than when turning the lens on the physical signs and symbols of our past and our present. Although we live and create our culture daily, we are often unconscious of it. A sign at a defunct diner, for example, is seen as a nostalgic relic, if it is seen at all. Because many of the older signs have lost their cultural familiarity, they can serve as a portal of entry into our current consciousness, allowing us a view of the world that is uncluttered by our old associations and projections. By presenting them in an unexpected way, whether cropped closely or shot from an unusual angle, I find I am able to further remove the viewer from his original associations, allowing him to see beyond the lens of nostalgia or familiarity–in short, allowing him to look at the world again. Stripped bare of our associations, we may see our signs and symbols as art, as comic, or as ironic, but perhaps most importantly, we are also free to see them as artifacts telling us who we were, what we have had to say, and how we defined ourselves, which in turn leads us to see who we are and what we are becoming.