Ryan Gear MA Photography
The lives we lead consist predominantly of familiarity and an existing within the known; that is, where there is order, where things run smoothly, where certainty prevails. But what about the realm outside of this safe haven? What about the landscape where, from time to time, people get lost, the territory in which we find ourselves when life is no longer going according to plan, where uncertainty prevails?
By venturing to locations unfamiliar to me and spending much time in solitude wandering through my surroundings, I set out to create a body of work not about any specific place or real location in the physical world, but about the human condition, the psychological and physical landscape of explored and unexplored territory in which we seem to exist, and the traversing of this landscape that is required of us if we are to grow, with the purpose of highlighting the importance, if not necessity of, from time to time, being lost.
Harnessing my own personal and philosophical concerns, and using photography and my visual language within the medium, I have attempted to communicate the struggle of the individual in finding his or her own meaning, the ambiguity and uncertainty that is so symptomatic of our experience of reality, and the possibility for salvation that seems to lie in not knowing. In stepping into the unknown and going in search of something.
insearchofsomething.cargo.site (project website).
