CARLOS JARAMILLO

Floating In The Hudson

While traveling throughout the North East, I noticed that many small towns begin to blend together, through similar religion, culture, people, and trades. Many of these towns share common themes in family and domestic life, making them virtually indistinguishable from one another. The purpose of my project is to play on this idea and create a fictional town of my own through a series of photographs, similar to the way small towns are formed in movies. Often a movie is about a single town, but shot in many different towns in order to create the ideal small town America feeling. I take pictures of objects, people, and places found throughout these towns but do not attach names or geographic locations to them. By doing this, I displace their context and generalize it for my purpose of using it in my own way to create a small town of my own. The images I chose speak to the banal characteristics of small towns and their problems. I play on the ideas of forgotten dreams, youth boredom, and artificial décor, both in a satirical and romanticized manner.