Pre-project thoughts on City Ensouling Project

The City has a soul; it has many souls. However, these souls are not evident to us self-absorbed humans who in fact made these souls possible.

Japan has a long history of ensouling supposedly inanimate objects. Tsukumogami in Japanese folklore are everyday tools that have gained a spirit - ensouled - upon their 100th year of existence. They are usually harmless tricksters, but if someone throws away the tool in its 99th year, the tool will become ensouled but become more malicious because it will be angered that it was discarded.

I have always been fascinated by objects and how they “feel” about how they have been treated by us humans, their creators. I often feel a sense of sympathy for something unceremoniously discarded on the ground; crumpled, alone, damaged. No one pays attention to it during their rushed lives until it just disappears maybe, just maybe, into one of those malicious spirits having no qualms about wreaking havoc on us heartless and wasteful humans.

I chose Polaroids produced using the SX-70 because of the imperfect and soft image the cooperation among the camera, film, and human produces, capturing that spirit-like ephemerality - ensouling The City. I have not yet decided how to physically produce this project. I plan to use the original Polaroids (not use the digitized images that I make when scanning the originals) to make them more a one-off. Polaroids are square, but perhaps mount them on a large rectangular piece of photo paper so will have room to add text and marks of oil paint.

The gallery below are the images I have chosen for the project, as of now anyway, I call such images ‘intimate urban portraits’. The images are quite focused on objects or parts of larger objects, e.g., buildings, found in urban environments.