Most of us have, at some point in our lives, experienced something traumatic. In many cases, we associate these experiences with the locations where they took place: a park bench where a relationship ended; a street corner where a mugging took place; an intersection that was the scene of terrible accident. In a densely populated urban environment like New York, one would be hard pressed to find a square inch of the landscape that has not been the locus of a trauma for someone at some point. Through sheer quantity, these locations and the experiences associated with them are anonymized, buried, ignored by the thousands of people who pass through them every day. By collecting people’s experiences and taking pictures of the locations where they took place, I hope to illuminate this anonymization, to rehumanize these locations, and to give people some form of acknowledgment and validation of their experiences.For this project, I am collecting anonymous descriptions of places where people have had traumatic experiences. I then go to those locations and use the descriptions of the experiences as guidelines for taking pictures. A Google Maps-based submission system allows contributors to place markers on a map of new york and then add a description of the location and what happened to them there. I then take these descriptions with me to the marked locations where I allow them to control my picture-taking.

There are numerous projects, artworks and creative processes that are relevant to my artistic practice as a whole, and to this project in particular. Here is a small sample:

SOPHIE CALLE: THE SLEEPERS. For this conceptual photography project, Calle invited twenty-four people — both strangers and freinds — to lie in her bed in Paris over the course of 24 hours. She fed them and entertained them, and she photographed each of them. The project involved setting up a rule structure that allowed a situation to emerge, and then allowing the situation to create a set of constraints within which she had to take the photos.

MARTHA ROSLER: THE BOWERY IN TWO INADEQUATE DESCRIPTIVE SYSTEMS. Rosler’s classic work of conceptual photography (considered to be one of the founding works of the genre) is a series of lonely photographs of the Lower East Side of New York paired with sets of words that describe the neighborhood and its denizens. The idea here is that both the images and the words are insufficient; they fail to fully capture the essence of the place. In some sense, this work acknowledges the inadequacy not only of the images themselves, but also of the process and basis for taking them: the attempt to capture something by trying to take a picture of it. Thus, decisions about photographic content are challenged.

EMILY JACIR: WHERE WE COME FROM. Jacir used her American passport to travel between Israel and the Palestinian territory. She asked Palestinians living in exile, if they could do anything in Palestine, what it would be. Then she went and did those things and took photographs of herself doing them. To a certain extent, Jacir’s project is less about photography than it is about doing the things that she did. But the photographs are an essential part of the project, and they are documents of experiences, desires and decisions that were not entirely her own.

KATY GRANNAN: POUGHKEEPSIE JOURNAL. This project consists of a series of portraits taken under duress. Grannan placed ads in a local paper in upstate New York looking for models. When a potential subject called her, she met the subject at a location of his or her choosing, taking with her nothing but her camera, a light and a fan. She then asked the subject how he or she wanted to be photographed, set up the shot and took the picture within a space of three hours. The resulting photographs are not only beautiful; they carry with them a loose quality, a sense of freedom from exacting conscious control or self-restraint.

DOUGLAS LEVERE: NEW YORK CHANGING. Levere took his camera around New York and rephotographed pictures taken by Berenice Abbott in the 1930s. He went to the same locations where Abbott took her photographs and attempted to replicate the camera position and framing of the original photographs as exactly as possible. This highly-constrained project was intended to draw attention to the ways in which the subject, New York, has changed in the time between the two sets of photographs, but it also dances around the question of what the photographer’s role in the photographic process is. If he is recreating an existing photograph, to what extent is Lever the “photographer” of his images? (Richard Prince raised similar questions with his 1983 photograph of naked, 10-year-old Brooke Shields originally taken by another photographer, Gary Gross.)

YOKO ONO: CUT PIECE: Ono’s piece is the only non-photographic work listed here, but in many ways it is the most relevant to my project. This performance work involved Ono sitting on a stage wearing a dress, with a pair of scissors next to her. Audience members were invited to use the scissors to cut her dress. By situating her control over the work at a higher level — setting up the rules that the piece would follow (the stage, the dress, the scissors, the idea of cutting) — Ono was able to create the illusion of lack of control: she made herself part of the medium, the material, the tools and the process, while leaving the decision-making (which is typically viewed as the locus of artistic creativity) to the participants.

Anyone who likes to look at photographs, has lived in and moved through New York, and/or has had a traumatic experience in his or her life.

The viewer approaches the project and sees the photographs. She then reads the description of how they were taken and the text that accompanies each image. Ideally, reading about the project and seeing the pictures makes her want to submit a location to the database.

It\'s a collection of photographs. I hope to put it in book form, but it may just be a bunch of prints.