BY DOMINIQUE SHAW
I’m always seeing photographs but I don’t always take them. Most of them I just register in my mind and enjoy without the need to press the shutter. Since moving to a new town earlier this year though I seem to find that internal trigger going off more and more often…
My photography takes me to different towns and cities all around the world but however deeply I try to immerse myself into the community of each place I visit it’s always brief: only ever experiencing a snippet of what that culture, that community is really about. But actually moving to a new town, even one that on the face of it is not dissimilar to the place you’ve come from, is a different experience. Walking the length and breadth of a city can reveal all kinds of remarkable scenes alongside tiny pockets of peculiarity, but observing with growing accustom the life and characters in a tiny town square brings a different understanding, a fresh intimacy. Like any other town in any other country we visit these people around me, going about the business of every day life remain, for the time being at least, strangers to me. Yet we’re bound somehow by a common choice: an unspoken bond through the community we have unknowingly decided to share. Connection is at the very heart of photography, and as my connection to this place grows the click of the shutter in the back of my mind is heard increasingly often and with growing tenacity. I hope it’s subtle tones of excitement don’t fade with familiarity.
