Found | Nigel Poor

On January 1st, 1998, I began a project called FOUND. It is a journal of time, the environment, and of myself. Every day I took a walk to collect something outside-in streets and alleys, playgrounds and fields, gutters and lawns. The objects I found varied, but they all were things that had been cast off, things that would be considered debris. I brought each piece back to my studio and then photographed it individually with a black background to induce the feeling of something hovering or floating to the surface. Through the photographs, the objects began to acquire new meanings: they were reminiscent of anatomy, they became beautiful sculptures, they were clues to hidden worlds, and so on. It is as if each object had fallen from a story, and, in its finding, was plucked out of the obscurity of some invisible narrative. In this sense, the object became “evidence” which deserved closer inspection. The entire Found project relates to the entomologist’s or taxonomist’s process: collecting, sorting, cataloging, and assigning value to things which might be seen everyday but are often ignored, overlooked or misunderstood.

Whether strung together as weeks, coalesced as months, or combined into the entire year, in sequence these photographs stand as silent witness to the passing of time-both as a meditation on the duration of each object’s existence (its joyous or dutiful making, useful heyday, fateful abandonment and inevitable decay) and as a slow, careful clock with a second hand gracing 365 faces. These lost objects–these dumb things-present a concrete if oblique account of a year’s day-by-day appearance, and disappearance, and in doing so catalyze a remembrance of one’s own passing of time.

Images are 10×8” brown toned silver gelatin prints, 1998-2000