home project 1 by Summer '07 contender Dan Boardman.

Reading the work statement of today's contender Dan Boardman, I found myself drawn to his latest inspirations, which he lists as "Martin Parr's boring postcard collection", "all things Russian", and (of course) "ponies off and on". So, I'm down with Martin Parr (read Joerg's conversation with him on Conscientious) and I'm into ponies (My Little Pony anyone?), but what I'm all about is Russia.

Aside from the fact that my parents and larger family are from all over the former Soviet Union, all of our family friends (writers, painters, and general alcoholics) are Russian as well, so I grew up surrounded by Russian cultural influences. From within my parents' social sphere, I discovered two wonderful Russian poets who now mean the world to me: Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva, both of whom I later studied more thoroughly in this unbelievable class I took in Prague, called "Post-War East European Poetry: The Still Unborn About the Dead" taught by poet Michael March (read his syllabus here).

Anyway...while browsing through Dan's flickr page, I found a lovely series called "from the motherland", a work in progress of moody and diverse images of Russia. Then I moved on to his series entitled home from which the posted photo comes from. About this work, which came out of a series of trips to his hometown, he writes, "I found something static about home. In a front yard, or a parking lot I could find my feet stepping into my old footprints, but seeing now what I had missed then... This work was an investigation into memory, how it changes and what traces trigger a relationship between then and now." These words share an interesting connection with the "motherland" images, since Russia is somehow (for me, at least) the be-all and end-all of homes, both physically and conceptually.

Dan, however, is not from Russia. At least his quirky bio doesn't say he is:

I was born in Ontario, California and moved to a small town in Central New York when I was in third grade. My pop's job moved him from UCLA to Syracuse University. I spent most of my youth like Tom Sawyer, (swimming, eating pancakes, faking my own death). In high school as a door prize at my after prom party I won a digital point and shoot. The camera had no screen and a mere 2-Mega Pixels. It held fifteen shots. I'm glad my Mom made me go to prom, I'm also glad I was nerdy enough to spend the rest of prom night with adult chaperones and teachers in the converted casino cafeteria.

He is now entering his senior year at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He describes his beginning with photography as an accidental introduction to two photographers:

When I first started shooting, a friend recommended me to slower.net. Which was incredibly inspiring and important in getting me to shoot everyday, and chronicle all the nooks and crannies of my day-to-day life. Around the same time another friend came back from New York City with Stephen Shore's Uncommon Places, which he found at random on the side of the road, and gave to me. Stephen Shore opened up a world contrary to that of Eliot Shepard, and even though I didn't fully understand Shore's work then, it did, to say the least, mark the beginning of my love for formal photography.

That's all for today, folks! Meanwhile, every single one of you should enter the competition now!