Hyperlocal

I recently stumbled across the word hyperlocalism.

It made me smile.

Not because I had been looking for a name for what I was doing. Rather because I seem to have arrived somewhere near it from another direction.

When this “experiment” began, I wasn’t trying to photograph locally.

I was trying to see if going outside with a camera and a small close-up lens could change anything.

The first outing didn’t go far.

I came back from the mundane backyard behind our workshop having seen something there I had somehow not seen before.

Nothing had happened to the backyard.

I had approached it differently.

Since then I have returned to the same few places again and again. At some point I wrote that I could probably find infinite depth within the 20 metres behind the workshop.

That still seems about right.

Usually novelty asks us to move.

A new place.
A new subject.
A new thing.

But there is another direction available.

Closer.

A familiar patch of grass becomes terrain. An insect passing through it becomes an event. Rain rearranges a surface. The same plant is not quite the same plant a week later.

The geographical distance can approach zero while the perceptual distance keeps opening.

Perhaps that is where OP7 happens to meet hyperlocalism.

Not as a rule about staying home, and not as a photographic genre I set out to practice.

More as a consequence of making it easy to change scale.

If looking closer requires changing equipment, preparing for macro photography, or deciding that now I am going to photograph small things, it becomes another activity.

Reduce that interruption enough and the close world can remain part of the ordinary one.

You are walking.

Something catches your attention.

In.

For a moment, a few centimetres are enough.

Out.

You continue.

The strange thing is that repeatedly doing this seems to make the familiar less familiar, not more.

The world doesn’t run out quite as quickly.

Maybe hyperlocal doesn’t have to mean that the world becomes smaller.

It might mean discovering how much world there is in where you already are.

In. Out. Return. (Slightly changed.)