About Apartment 304

These photographs are from an ongoing series of snapshots taken in and around my wife's and my apartment with a Polaroid camera and instant film over many years. I've had the idea of making images of my immediate domestic, day to day environment ever since spending a summer during college living in the Boston expressionist painter Jason Berger's art filled apartment in Brookline. He painted mainly landscapes but I had a special affinity for the work he produced in his apartment. I was amazed at how his unique way of seeing transformed the space in which I was living into abstract, playful, and frenzied lines of color and space. Robert Bechtel is another artist whose use of everyday domestic scenes in his work has influenced my approach to this project.

We've lived in this rent controlled apartment for over 20 years and although the rent is very reasonable we sometimes think about moving. The thought of living somewhere else is a poignant reminder that although we've spent a good part of our lives here it may, at some point, be just a memory. When I peel apart a print I've just exposed, that moment becomes the past and the object an artifact. I've made a lot of pictures of physical details of our apartment over the years, but the series mainly consists of those that depict the quiet moments of little consequence that comprise most of our time.