It might be said that photographs of buildings, parking lots, streets, and other structures of the built environment, depict familiar and known subjects that are readily part of the everyday human experience of urban spaces. However, a photograph shows that which does not exist. The “non-place.” The referent of the photographic image is out of context, out of frame, flattened by the process, translated by hundreds of conscious and unconscious choices, mediated by the artist and the artist’s equipment and materials – photographs are a “thing” unto themselves – separate and apart from that which existed at the time the image was made.
