Visitor Parking
A series of photographs made for a photography class about loneliness, strange visitors, and taking someone up on that ride they offered. (Made for Digital Imaging class, two-week timeframe, May 2021).
Project Brief
For this final project, we were simply prompted to create a series of photos discussing whatever subject material we wished to exercise the narrative-building skills the class focused on.
What I Created
Visitor Parking is about loneliness and the divine comfort when it is shared.
The pedestrian wanders the streets alone. Images framed in black show life passing by, the pedestrian's lonely walk effectively invisible. The images are shrunken and distant; they may as well be happening millions of miles away. The lights are on, so someone must be home, but there is no one to be seen.
Lights glow over empty streets. The driver is alone, looking for a passenger. A chance encounter. Entranced by their mutual strangeness to each other, they stand for a moment, then an offer is made. The pedestrian accepts the ride. Neither are alone anymore. The escape is strange and divine, and then they are gone, the empty streets left behind.
Takeaways
This project gave me the opportunity to construct a narrative from scratch and explore how to represent it visually. I got the chance to practice a more time-based approach to photography than I have in the past, figuring out how the pacing would work, and explore how to represent the character of the driver abstractly. It also gave me the chance to work on some technical skills, doing a bit of directing with my friend as well as shooting and editing in RAW.
Process work
Inspiration from Experience
The series details an alien visitor searching for a companion and picking up the lonely pedestrian, completely changing each of their worlds. The title, visitor parking, is in reference the driver's brief visit from a completely different place.
I created these images during a difficult semester at school. Working incredibly long and demanding hours on a campus emptied out by the pandemic created an intense sense of isolation, and once my peers and I realized we were all in similar situations and weren't struggling alone, the relief we all felt was incredible, inspiring me to create a series of images about the divine experience of not being alone anymore.
I decided to work with an alien because aliens represent the completely strange, a completely new way of thinking and understanding. When the pedestrian accepts the ride, they enter a whole new reality, distant from the dark and empty streets and instead full of light in a way they've never understood it before. To figure out we weren't alone, that we were all struggling, may as well have been a move to a new planet; it was mind blowing. I suddenly had a support system and a chance to understand my situation in a completely new way.