2021, after a year of lockdown and of walking and wandering in circles around where we live, it should not be surprising that photographing the mundane has been rediscovered and grew in popularity: making Virtue of Necessity. 

For some there is a natural  attraction to this banality. Instagram generic content is the exact opposite: showing the extraordinary in an desperate effort to escape time and mortality. Perfect illustration of the let’s pretend game that Blaise Pascal (17^th Century French thinker) would have described quite aptly as “divertissement”. Not so much entertainment in the modern sense, rather our desperate search for consolation  when facing the difficulty of being and being ourselves.

Depicting banality is a way to accept that we are  who we are, not necessarily perfect, harmonious, but engaged and intertwined with the world around us, part of the fabric of a changing and evolving cosmos.

Again behind the let’s pretend game popularised by social media, what is lurking is the futile denial of the passage of time. A great classic formulation of the age old underlying lament resonates to this day from Heraclitus of Ephesus   (6^th Century BC): πάντα ῥεῖ; "everything flows".

Banality, the mundane as a conscious project of depicting the world cannot be an isolated endeavour, One image I believe is not quite enough. 

I mean that one image such as this empty parking lot in an industrial estate will have  limited impact in itself on the viewer. The photograph needs the viewer to process through his / her own mind.  Once done it  is associated with the viewer’s universe it may work (or not).

For instance , I have to admit that the now abundant US based mundane imagery needs me to pay attention and then in my eyes become interesting. Having educated myself to appreciate US photographic culture I then have an intellectual link to the context. When immersed in a body of work with theses images, it becomes easier to relate.

For me relation to the mundane is easier in the world around me, I can identify those subtle messages that tell me time is passing, has passed, this world is going away from me.

A fabulous illustration for me is Raymond Depardon’s work  (please see https://www.magnumphotos.com/theory-and-practice/la-chambre-raymond-depardon/) The photographs you’ll see there may not resonate with you in any way. For me however it brings back to life a French rural world I had seen as a child and teenager in the isolated and deprived Corrèze area. Mundane, banal, however bringing to the surface extremely deep emotions of loss, tenderness for a world of ghosts.

Last summer I took a few images in a rural lodging which were a shock when I saw the scans back: it was as if my inner Depardon had been unleashed. That there had been a processing accident made it even more real to me. 

This may or may not work with you. Let me know where you stand on the banal, do you embrace it or hate it?