Lisa Avery recently contacted me about my offer to showcase photographers that did not get into Review Santa Fe…and I was more than happy to oblige.

Lisa’s passion for photography began in high school and after studying Studio Arts and Photography at Scripps College , she then studied at the Burren College of Art in Ireland. Her work has been shown in a variety of galleries from San Francisco to Ballyvaughan, County Clare, Ireland. Lisa was a semifinalist for the Center of Documentary Studiesʼ 25 Under 25 and most recently, her work will be featured in the exhibition, A Sense of Place, at the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art in Augusta, GA from September 18 – October 16, 2009.

The series that she submitted to RSF was Mobile Landscape, and her statement follows:

This series is the manifestation of a simple desire: to photographically capture the passing of time, particularly time spend in transit. Most photographs freeze time or simplify experiences and events down to a collection of fractions of seconds. This is the antithesis of my goal. To capture the passage of time and passage through space, I use medium format film in a pinhole camera. As a resident of Los Angeles, I am a member of a culture which spends an inordinateamount of time in vehicular isolation. With my images, I meditate on this experience of simultaneous stillness and movement, isolation and community. I reclaim the mundane moments that demand my time as I move from one place to another as part of my daily existence.

Everyday in my car, I am quite literally passing life by. In my daily commute to work, my trip to the grocery store, or even in my travels to vacation spots, I drive past hundreds of homes and businesses. I zip past thousands of people, most of whom I will never meet. I daydream as my eyes pass over hillsides I will never hike and roads I will never explore. And while I do this, I am surrounded by a community of others who are using their time, money, and energy doing exactly the same thing: driving.