Never mind what Beaudelaire said, photographs are not merely archives. My goal is to capture things that generally do not get noticed, to tell a story with them at the center. A living room in an abandoned building in Detroit, frozen in time from when the fire burned their building and made the family homeless. Photography has a complex relationship with time. Events happen, but they don’t take place when the shutter is clicked, the pixels recorded. They just happen. They just are.

My “Untitled Detroit Project” was largely accidental. I was searching for subjects, searching for some meaning with my photography. In so doing, I found my soul. Nestled under our down comforters in our centrally heated homes, we tend to forget about the folks wandering around for food, curling up into themselves under a bridge. We walk through but don’t see the cities - in my case, Detroit - falling apart. We want to push them away. We want no part of them.

My camera allows me to see things, to notice. To participate in my surroundings. When not looking through a lens, I barely notice my surroundings, I’m not participating. My camera led me to a group of fantastic, fearless people with whom I walked through abandoned buildings, trekked through the unknown, got dirty. Through this I was able to capture my own mosaic of Detroit - the historic, broken Michigan Central Train Station, the old, abandoned Packard Plant. Destroyed housing projects that left people homeless but were inhabited by squatters. I saw Detroit and it is my heart. It, like a lot of our cities around the world, needs someone to notice. It needs help.

But I saw, I participated. And that’s what photography is.

I take snapshots of other things, of course: nature, animals, people, situations. I’ve learned to let the camera take me where it may. But I never, ever want to capture something generically. I firmly believe that I am in each photograph I take, inside each click of the shutter. My photography isn’t just a window into life, it’s a window into my own self. My photography is me. It’s colored by the way I view the world: slightly sad, slightly angry, perpetually perplexed. My work is an outlet for me and, as such, is a direct line into myself. My idol, the great Henri Cartier Bresson, said: “For me, photography is to place head heart and eye along the same line of sight. It is a way of life.” It’s a way of life for me as well. Head, heart and eye merged together in that moment.

It’s not merely an archive, it’s a way of life. I hope you enjoy my work, and thank you for visiting.

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Anastacia
Anastacia Campbell Photography