clay mills

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My camera looks for the too-familiar in America. That which one sees everyday but has become un-aestheticized through its omnipresence. The modus operandi of most contemporary photography is to avoid the too-familiar. I seek to make it the sole focus of my photography. If no one wants to look at it, maybe that means there’s actually something there. In the 19th century the center of the new was the great cities industrialization fostered. Walter Benjamin called Paris the capital of the 19th century. No such place exists today, despite competing claims from various metropolitan centers around the world. Instead, the new must be sought elsewhere. It has been dispersed along with people, who were spread throughout suburbs and slums in the 20th century, suburbs and slums which have now become strange blossoms of exurban sprawl. What has remained true is that the new desires empty space, whether naturally empty or made empty by destructive forces. The newly new is destined to become the has-been, the ever same. And this is our relationship with the world now, a new world which now appears to us all too stale, even if it is in fact, really new. We live in an American that has been primarily exurban for a while now. What’s new is everyone we know has grown up in that environment, it’s taken for granted. What does it mean to turn our ever-present image of life back onto ourselves? To make the too-familiar unfamiliar by photographing it earnestly? To ask, why does our life look like this? This is what I task myself with as a photographer.

Artist Bio

Clay Mills is a photographer, filmmaker and writer originally from Texas, now based in Chicago. Clay photographs modernity, taking pictures of the “ugly” as if it was “beautiful.” His photos have been derided by the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s Curator of Photography as “like Cartier-Bresson taking the decisive moment, but [instead] taking the indecisive moment.” He has shown work at Filter Photo, the Gene Siskel Film Center, Experimental Sound Studio, and the Museum of the Big Bend. Clay's hope is that his work is adequate to what Baudelaire tasked us with: to capture, “the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present-day life... often weird, violent, and excessive.”