Ape Rifle

Westmount, Quebec, Canada

Paris, France

Zibo, Shandong, P.R. China

Hangzhou, Zhejiang, P.R. China

London, UK

Pemba, Mozambique

I am one to believe that the plainting cries of homogenization that so often accompany talk of globalization, the grand story of our time, are greatly exaggerated. Above I have posted images of the various neighbourhoods of my life, a crude example of the very different worlds that co-exist on our single planet. In each of these places, a deep mix of history, geography, culture and environment conspire to render superficial any claims of similarity based on shopping patterns or vehicles driven.

Granted, the various spaces of our globe are more connected in some ways than ever before, more deeply intertwined through the absurd machinations of trans-border industrial production (next to come, outsource your life?). But a “global village” we surely are not; we remain, above all, local creatures. Only the place we are in is real to us at any one time- the other locales we might have known, the other places we may have visited or lived, are nothing but strange dreams until we reach them again. Perhaps this is our mind’s attempt to make sense of the wildly different realities which are but a plane flight apart, of the immense variety of conditions that can be classified under the rubric of human existence. Culture shock, after all, is the collision of a mind attached to one place with the reality of another.

I have lived in all the realities pictured above, their wildly divergent conditions in turn acting as standards of the human condition. When you are in one place, the others- in their entirety, in their form, in their perspective, in their outlook - rarely if ever make sense. As I sit here in Canada once again, I struggle to understand that life over there still somehow exhibits the same normality as when I lived there. Although I can easily communicate with such places, their realities are as far away as ever. And I don’t think shipping crates crossing oceans will do much to change that.

 

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Globalization, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.