It is 2011, I was in my final term of studies at college and given the topic “Exploration and Discovery” for my final creative photography topic. There are many ways I could have looked at this: examination of new places, a new beginning, new species, going on journeys with the sole intention to unexpectedly discover something new and so on.
I did, indeed, unexpectedly discover something new, however, contrary to typical exploration, when I chose to look into the unfamiliar areas of other peoples’ lives, I discovered something quite the opposite of “new”.
I discovered new is not always different.
Every day, we find a new way of doing things, even the most mundane of tasks, such as chores, preparing meals and finding new material to read on the commute to work. We live in an ever-changing world where every opportunity presents itself with an even broader variety of choices. We spend so much time focusing on the finer details of our choices, which make us all so different, such as what type of coffee is being served, what article is being read and which direction we are going, that we lose sight of how similar we all are.
During the busy hustle and bustle of today’s humanity, even the most intriguing of individuals can be overlooked. I decided to take the idea that, if you stripped back our everyday lives to the basics, as individuals, we are not so unique. Many of life’s day-to-day tasks are not defined at all by the person undertaking them. Yes, the individual may be trying a new recipe, they may be planting a new garden or maybe simply waking up into a new day, but the tasks themselves are ones that are not at all new and have in fact been set in their ways for many years.
I discovered that trying something new could also be viewed as “teaching a new dog old tricks”. I discovered that it was just as important to try and discover old ways of doing things, as it was new ways. Sharing knowledge of the already known is a very important discovery.