The unboring eye

The art of photographing the "Boring' Place"

Living in a big city helped me improve my photography and pushed me to go out and photograph strangers. No one generally cares about you, everyone is too busy thinking about their own lives and challenges rather than a random photographer. But this luxury normally doesn’t happen in small towns, where everyone knows everyone, and a camera in a place where the age range is over 50+ is some kind of an event. It's in these quieter, often overlooked places that the true challenge, and perhaps the greatest reward, of photography emerges: to transform the boring into the beautiful, proving that a place's photographic potential lies more in the eye of the beholder than in its obvious appeal.

I used to live in a very small town, and I remember how challenging this was. I basically didn't do any type of street photography at the time, and my excuse was always: “this place is too boring.”
I spent a few days in Italy to relax and decompress at my mother’s house, which is not the house where I grew up, nor is it even the town I grew up in. It’s a weird feeling when I’m there, of not belonging either in Italy or in the UK (but this is for another article). The place where she lives doesn't really offer many attractions, and it’s a pretty common town along a main road.

This occasion allowed me to think about the concept of boring places and how much it's actually more in our minds than in a viewer's mind. What looks ordinary to my mother, like an old poster on the road, faded in colours and almost entirely broken, for me was a witness to a time that will not happen again. It was the poster of a circus under the name of Moira Orfei, a very famous Italian circus lady.

I think that familiarity with a place, a connection to a place, creates some kind of blindness. The usual street, the same commute, the same field of corn seem not to offer any new possibility of exploration in photographic terms. Feeling like an outsider helped me first to see these things under a different light, but also to share my perspective with someone desensitized by their everyday surroundings

If we think about great photographers like Saul Leiter, Fred Herzog, Ruth Orkin, etc., yes, we can often discern the location if we observe the architecture. But sometimes we can't recognize if the shot is from New York or a town in Oregon. If you think about it, as photographers, we should be able to take meaningful pictures wherever we are. Yes, I know, some places are definitely full of potential, but as creatives, the challenge is to make the everyday, the common, the boring places interesting with their own stories. Saul Leiter would be a great photographer even if he shot pictures in Basel, Switzerland, or Cagnes-sur-Mer in France. The location isn't the main point of a picture, it's what you want to tell that really counts. (imagine the meme with the expanding brain here).

If I haven't energized you by making the argument that you can be the next big name in the photography panorama even if you live in a boring place, another way to challenge yourself when you're not feeling inspired by your surroundings is to pick a theme like a colour or a shape. Or even focus on something you wouldn't normally take into consideration, like patterns, light and shadows, perspective, or details. Honestly, the possibilities are endless, and what you'll get from this exercise is an improvement in your observation skills and new opportunities to share your unique story.

For me, these few days helped me to find meaning and depth in a seemingly unremarkable boring place, but more importantly, they reinforced a vital truth: the power of a photograph lies not in the grandeur of its setting, but in the unique perspective and story the photographer chooses to tell. This experience reminded me that inspiration isn't found in a famous landmark, but cultivated through an active, curious eye, wherever you are.