Description

Secret Visit involves planning a secret visit from my place to a certain friend’s place, which is located twenty blocks away from my place, on the opposite side of downtown Calgary. A detailed city map is used to notate the route that is to be taken, with a series of corresponding photographs providing a basic description of possible hiding places between the two points. The process speculates upon eventually making the trip by foot, completely undetected by the incidental occupants and passers-by en route. In this case, I would be traveling under the cover of night, wearing a uniform based on that of a cat-burglar, and operating on a carefully prepared itinerary.

Concept

Secret Visit is intended to serve as a kind of photographic essay of a particular urban landscape. It provides an alternative mode of viewing the built environment, as it relates to common perceptions of the division between private and public space. The landscape in which the project occurs is distinguished by a private place existing on either end of a path, with a public space in-between. One purpose of the photographs is to open the potential of private space existing within the larger public space – in this case, as hiding places. The photographs present an ideal view of a specific landscape: a best-case scenario where every photograph remains void of people, who ultimately threaten the conceptual parameters of the project. The photographs then, also allude to the impossibility of the project’s objective, as it is the conditions existing outside of the image frame – and outside of the vision’s periphery – that would ultimately determine the objective’s success or failure.