Modern Actions

This project was shot between the middle of 2007 and the first few months of 2008, and it represents a transitional period for me, in terms of both my personal life and the types of work I was interested in pursuing. It covers the few months either side of the birth of my daughter, and so the work I made during this period reflects the changes I was making elsewhere; a general slowing down, you might say, and an increased sense of reflection and purpose, not to mention a wider consideration of the long-term effects of one’s actions. I had begun to move away from the more reactive street-influenced work of previous years, and was just starting to explore some ideas that would lead me on to the longer-term projects that I worked on subsequently. These ideas, loosely based around the sense that places have their own memory, or surface history – a patina built up over the years by the presence of the people that have passed through them, and the lives that have been lived there – developed into a thread that continues to run through most of my current work. Modern Actions represents the period where I first started to develop those themes.

www.alexjdsmith.com

[Interview by Alan Pelz-Sharpe]
This interview is done using Skype technology.