The first thing I do in a new location is look for boring postcards. Not the ones on the rack, but the scenes that would never be photographed and made into a postcard. I deliberately try to make four horizontal photographs of the dullest things I can find. Car parks. Ordinary shop facades. Scraps of landscape that appear to have zero photographic ‘value’. It is a small habit of mine, but one I do more and more as it immediately changes how I start seeing a place.
This idea owes something to Stephen Shore, though not in any lofty way. Before his photographs became museum-bound, he also made mundane postcards. Straightforward images of everyday scenes. Shore treated the postcard as a normal way of looking rather than something to rise above.
