Photographing the Urban Everyday: An Aesthetic Re-Engagement with Perth

This paper discusses how photography can facilitate an experiential re-engagement with the urban environment of Perth. Re-presenting functional objects that have become so common place that they are overlooked, or regarded as banal and mundane, I create photographic works that activate an experiential moment for the viewer by aesthetically asking them to pause and appreciate the aesthetics that are inherent in the everyday mundane world. Photographing objects such as piping, light boxes, light switches, drains and vents so that they be reconsidered aesthetically, I create large-scale photographs that monumentalise functional everyday objects found in the urban environment. Employing three kinds of aesthetics I term the ‘painterly’, the ‘cinematic’ and the ‘utilitarian’, I create photographs that either defy their own medium by taking on the qualities of a painting or a film still, or blatantly re-present functional objects in such a way as to position them as photographic ‘ready-mades’. Offering an alternative framework or ‘lens’ with which to re-engage with overlooked objects and their surroundings, this paper discusses how the methodology of photography can be artistically employed to bring about a new ways of looking and engaging with dominant representations and constructions of the urban environment of Perth.