04.03.2014 в 01:03

Пишет  juliet must die:

JOHN WILLIAM KEEDY | IT'S HARDLY NOTICEABLE

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John William Keedy pays close attention to how people use the word “normal.” That’s because he’s often felt like he doesn’t fit into the standard definition due to an anxiety disorder he was diagnosed with nine years ago. That experience gave him a springboard for It’s Hardly Noticeable, a wide-reaching photo exploration of thoughts and behaviors that fall outside the norm.

~~~“At its worst I had a lot of difficulty with crowds and large groups of people, and so I would do things like grocery shop late at night or early in the morning when stores were more likely to be empty,” says Keedy, 28. “At one point I also had a difficult time interacting with strangers, and while now I’m much better at that than I used to be, there was a period when it caused me to have a fairly limited network of friends.”

Not all the scenarios in the project relate to Keedy’s life, and some are easier to read than others. There’s the fence with hash marks that clearly alludes to some sort of obsessive behavior. But there’s also a puzzling image of a glass leaking milk from holes, which Keedy says is a play on the “glass is half full/empty” idiom: He creates a third option where the glass is half full, an optimistic view, but it requires constant effort to remain so.

“I think that image really came from the feeling of dealing with these anxieties and acknowledging that it’s a lot of work,” Keedy says. “For me, it involves a lot of checking and making sure that now, years later, I’m not flipping back into older routines that weren’t the healthiest.”

While the project is rooted in personal experience, Keedy prefers the work to be viewed in the larger context of normalcy and otherness, and for the narratives of each image to stand on their own. He appears in some of the images not as himself, but as a character in a scene. The photos are supposed to be thought-provoking, not conclusive. It’s specifically the conclusive nature of diagnosing certain behaviors as abnormal that bothers him.

“I just wonder about putting such a finite and firm label on something that is really changing constantly,” he says. “I’m not out to teach the world a lesson, I’m just trying to let myself be myself.”

The subject matter is serious, but Keedy also tries to be playful in some of the pictures. He knows if he takes it too seriously, the project becomes impenetrable.

“There is often an element of humor that makes it a little more manageable for the viewer but also more manageable for me,” he says.

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