HoboEye Art:
Scott Hammond, Ohio

You will probably never see me at Daytona Beach or Martha’s Vineyard. If you do, I’ll most likely be spending my time in a nearby parking lot staring at a piece of trash on the ground wondering if it would make a good photograph or not.

I spend a lot of time in parking lots, fields, highway embankments, and various other places that are not really meant to be observed for any given length of time. But I guess that’s what makes them so fascinating to me, the fact that these common places that are all around us are more or less foreign territory to people. Why take a photo of a wall or a sign when you can take a photo of a celebrity?

Before I became a photographer, things that are meant to be practical, thrown away, Unitarian, and otherwise boring have always interested me. When I would go on family trips in the summer, the gas stations we stopped at I found infinitely more interesting than the national park or beach we were headed to. Why? I didn’t really know at first, I just started picking up a camera and shooting ordinary things that I found interesting. Soon, those things seemed to make a little more sense to me. My eye was being guided to similar things like buildings, signs, fields, window displays, stuff on the ground, etc. And more or less, I was composing my images in the same way every time. I realized that I wasn’t really just snapping pics of whatever, but more so, cataloguing the ordinary in a clinical fashion that may not be evident by viewing one image, but as a whole I think you can see everyday life not through my eyes, but how everything just exists in this world and how really beautiful it can be.

So now this one-time habit of mine has turned into a full-blown compulsion. One would think that I could catalogue the everyday in my hometown or in my own backyard (if I had one), but one town’s worth of commonality is not enough for me. I want a comprehensive collection of images of our entire country that visually describes what our country is. If you’ve ever seen Stephen Shore’s “U.S. 97, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon, July 21, 1973” you’ll know why I’m so anxious to criss-cross the country looking for America.

Why Polaroid? Well, it’s the digital age, right? Polaroid’s aren’t really known for their sophistication and pristine quality. They’re used for snapshots, off-the-cuff photography. But isn’t the most earnest kind of photography? What’s more authentic, a digital image that can be corrected, or a grainy, fallible Polaroid? To me, the Polaroid offers the viewer a sense of authenticity that you get with no other medium. It’s the closest you can get to literally freezing a moment in time. And I guess that’s what I’ve being trying to say that I do, freezing a moment in time.

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