Through my practice, I try to cultivate an attentiveness to the world around me. I think of making as a way of connecting to the world of people and things. Recently, I came across an essay by documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, which discusses how ‘the familiar’, within everyday life, can act as a connector between people.
‘The familiar’ points to something shared; “What is familiar to us, may very likely be familiar to another.”1 But it also acknowledges the diversity of everyday life. In viewing something familiar we can ask: “is that my world? What, if not, does it have to do with mine?”1
Many artists and theorists of The Everyday use the idea of ‘making strange’ as a way of making overlooked things within the everyday visible. By this they mean, placing familiar overlooked things out of context; changing them to the point that they feel uncanny. In doing so, they claim, there is the possibility of re-noticing them. Through my practice, I have been playing with different levels of familiarity, pushing things towards strangeness. However recently I have been feeling less connected with what I am making and I wonder if I have moved my work too far away from my own everyday experience. Coming across Lange’s essay has made me re-think how I am currently approaching my practice. It has brought me back to familiar things.
For Lange, ‘the familiar’ creates “the possibility of a dialectical exchange between [photographer], subject and audience”2 I draw direct parallels between the ‘photographer’, ‘subject’ and ‘audience’ in Lange’s essay, to the ‘maker’, ‘wearer’ and ‘viewer’ in my own practice. In wearing something (an everyday object) that is familiar to someone else we might notice that our everyday lives have that thing in common.
Jewellery is already an object that connects; it can represent a union between people (wedding bands to use an obvious example) and it can also connect a person to a place. In this sense jewellery and ‘the familiar’ could be seen to act together as a ‘dual connector’ between people. While Covid-19 restrictions have loosened here in Melbourne, life is still feeling more isolated than normal. Coming across Lange’s essay feels particularly relevant to both me personally and for my practice.
- Lange, D 1966, ‘Documentary Photography’, in Photographers on Photography, eds. Nathan Lyons, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
- Sim, L 2015, ‘Theorising the Everyday’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol.30 no.84, pp. 109-127
