Essay 27 • Mar 28th 2016
- Photography by Eric Ogden
This series was born out of a lot of changes in my life last fall and resulted in me taking a solo drive up the west coast through Big Sur and spending a lot of time alone and being quiet, observing the world as an outsider, as if I were in a foreign country. During my trip I noticed actual foreign tourists with their cameras, and I related to their not quite understanding the language and customs happening around them.
I watched them document the everyday details that most natives wouldn't take notice of, finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, and taking delight in it. This way of perceiving the world I carried with me back to New York City and into the next 6 months as I created new work, incorporating new portrait shoots and delving into my archive of unseen work. I wanted to create a view of the everyday that feels otherworldly; beautiful and deep but simple and emotional at the same time.
Eric Ogden
I’m a photographer, director and artist, often working in New York City and Los Angeles.
My experiences growing up in Flint, Michigan…endlessly drawing as a kid, playing in bands, discovering punk music and cinema, my reckless teenage years, being turned on to great fiction, stumbling into self-taught filmmaking with friends, my growing excitement about the idea of what photography could be as I hit the college years, my interests in psychology and the mystery of childhood experience (with all its attendant wonder and fears)…are just some of the things that formed me. The lives and the landscape of the Midwest at some level still find their way into my work.