Daily project

These images are part of Daily, a series where I keep going back to the same kind of thing: objects so ordinary we’ve stopped seeing them at all.

I take them out of the place they usually sit in, off the counter, out of the routine, and once they’re out of context, something in them changes. They stop being useful and start being just themselves: a shape, a texture, a fragment of something almost decorative. An open dishwasher, a towel thrown over a rail, the tangle of an unmade bed, none of it reads as “daily life” anymore. It reads as evidence of how we live among things.

None of this is new, really. Duchamp did it with a urinal a century ago, and conceptual art has spent decades asking what an object means once you strip away what it’s for. Photographing these things is my version of that question: look hard enough at something ordinary and it stops being ordinary.

Each picture in Daily is an attempt at that kind of looking. Once an object is out of its usual place, it holds itself differently, it asks something of whoever’s looking at it, instead of just sitting there being used. What gets lost in the rush of a normal day comes back into view.

Really, this project is just an argument for slowing down. The things around us aren’t only tools, they hold on to bits of what we feel, what we’ve lived through, the shape of an ordinary day. Daily is something like a diary made of objects: an attempt to find what’s beautiful in the banal, and a little poetry in how we actually live.