Malcolm Ryder

Oakland, California

 

I jumped to photography from music composition, and from news, sports and theater shoots to environments. I shoot almost entirely outdoors, nearly exclusively with a smartphone camera. I largely collect and amplify what I see as “the mundane converted into the local vernacular”. I am  mostly influenced by drawing, postcards, transient television images, and other non-precious or disposable photo pictures.

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Many, if not most, of my images are about what people have done to their space, to the things in it, and to what that stuff “wants to look like if it gets a good chance to show you.” That generically is, perhaps, what gets called landscape, but I deliberately see and include the discarded, accidental, ambient, temporary, ignored or subliminal, as made and left in view by people who live with it but who, in my pictures, are not there.

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If there's some other underlying point, I guess it's that seeing without looking seems like a way of cultivating the visual equivalent of illiteracy. And while I have some consistent ways of seeing, I don't show only one kind of thing anymore than I think or talk about only one kind of thing.

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My pictures, although they can be, are rarely large and rarely printed, being aimed daily at digital screens or occasionally small books. Except that I have evidence, much of what I have shot either literally or visually no longer exists, having been created, episodically, by gradual change - and then eliminated by it.

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