Andrew Waits photographs Seattle's evolving landscape as dark, uncomfortable footnotes.

Aporia – a term attributed to the early dialogues of Socrates – is often tied to feelings of doubt, confusion or impasse, and has been associated with meandering, unsuccessful attempts to process trauma. It's also the title of Seattle-born photographer Andrew Waits' recent series and limited edition photobook, which he uses to address the emotional gravity of his native city's rapid economic and architectural boom.

Waits' black and white photographs look at the city's shifting skeleton and its impact on the human psyche. In contrast to his earlier, more traditionally documentary style and day job as a freelance editorial photographer, Waits approaches urban development and gentrification with a brooding, poetic gaze. Buildings battle with light and shadow, foliage juts in where it can, and people, when sparsely represented, bend like branches under increasing weight.

I corresponded with Waits to learn more about the metaphors and new directions in his work.

Interview by Jon Feinstein

An Elusive Way

In her recent body of work, Equivalents, Seattle-based Serrah Russell rephotographs details from advertisements and editorials within fashion, lifestyle and nature magazines, giving them new meaning by encouraging viewers to rethink how we "see." She focuses on the native photographs' dead space and superficially less important details in body parts, foliage and domestic interiors, and uses them to produce new images that serve as textural landscapes and emotional narratives.

Weathered Journey

"The source image often is intended to sell a product or a brand," says Russell, "so if even the fragment continues to do that, then that is not an image I want to rephotograph. I seek image fragments that can create some type of narrative, perhaps about beauty, sadness, experience, memory, individual, landscape, environment. "

The Light In The Hallway

Russell uses a Polaroid DayLab Copy Systems Pro camera -- which is essentially a scanner that uses Polaroid film -- to maintain the original scale of the image, allowing her to zero in on specific details without alteration. "I like the physicality that the Polaroid image provides as an art object. The images are transitioning from one printed image to another printed image and maintains the feeling of fragmentation."

Crater

Although the resulting pictures are clearly abstractions, they retain enough original details - the bridge of a nose, the space where hairline meets forehead, a closeup of a hand leaning on an old rug - to ground them, ever so slightly, to their original material. Russell's use of the Polaroid to carefully crop, isolate, enlarge and soften these secondary details, ultimately turns images that at once may have existed to sell products, sexuality, or constructed experiences of the natural world into thoughtful meditations on intimacy.

En Trance

I Have Been Here Before But You Know This

Present Absence

Being Revealed

Slowly Loosening Grip

Serrah Russell received her BFA in photography at the University of Washington. She works and lives in Seattle where she is also co-founder of Violet Strays, an online curatorial project with an emphasis on temporality and experimentation.

Photographing the Psychological Crush of Urban Growth

Photographing Time and Space From an Artist's Studio

Serrah Russell Turns Cold Advertising Into Intimate Landscapes