I almost never photograph in my own home. Maybe it’s too familiar, or too comfortable. It could be that I’m blind to the quality of interior light. All the same, I resonate with the daydreaming suggested in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, in which he describes the nuances and intimacy of domestic spaces: the comforting, limitless strength of a wall as it recedes into its corners, or the inflated memories of the dark basement of our childhood home. He’s probably right when he says that “memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home.” At home we can find a unique kind of rest, and “the house shelters day dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”

But daydreaming doesn’t end abruptly when we step outside. We define new spaces of intimacy everywhere we go, from which to experience all that is outside ourselves. The space might be as large as the interior of a car, or the space we take up on the bus. It might be just a few feet around us in each direction as we walk past other people in town. This is my space as I commute. This is where I go to buy things I need. This park bench is my home while I eat lunch.

When I photograph, I’m forming a daydream about a place, rooted in an image. The image creates a new space of intimacy for me, giving meaning to places outside of my own home.

“Daydreaming even has a privilege of autovalorization. It derives direct pleasure from its own being. Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.”

(Quotes from The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, 1964 translation, page 6)