Ian Ritter
A House, a Chair, a Girl, a Horse, and a Swimming Pool
Prompt: Spend a month working on a project that in some way relates to the research you are conducting in seminar.
The series of photographs is comprised of common suburban elements. As fiction is born from the mundane, the photographs delve further than their depictions, to evoke narratives unconstrained to their physical manifestations. In addition, the photographic depictions could just as easily be within the same small middle America town as they could be far and disconnected, separated by hundreds of miles. The pictures bear no documentarian resemblance. They are subject to the viewer’s memories, understandings, and interpretations.
I decided to compose the series after reading just about everything Raymond Carver ever wrote, earlier this year. His stories have had a profound effect on me, probably more so than any photographer. Much like Walker Evans photographs, they appear to me, devoid of aesthetic affectation, but they swell with the narrative promise and expansive interpretive merit that my favorite photographs possess; a world within a picture, or a story within a story.