The daily commute is a regular practice in the art of dissolving into the crowd. With headphones in and head down, most of us barely register our surroundings while we rush to our destination. I know I am certainly no exception to this rule, especially on routes that I end up traveling regularly for months. But from time to time there is something that breaks us out of our cycle. Sometimes it's a huge accident that draws us to the suffering like moths to the flame and other times it's something small that just happens to catch your eye.
Walking home from class one day my Junior year, I happened to notice a bright red splotch on the yellow transformer a couple of blocks away from my apartment. On closer inspection I realized it was a sticker of a 50's housewife in a gas mask that someone had placed there. I don't know if it was because of the bright color or the sticker's aesthetic, I mean who doesn't love apocalyptic housewives, but it became something I couldn't miss. Every time I had to walk that direction my eye went straight to that sticker. The next year I was given an assignment to create a photography series of my choice. There was really only one option, I wanted to find more stickers. For the project I stayed in the North Oakland/ Pitt's campus, since it was the area I knew the best, and ended up finding a wide variety of styles and placements. I'd have to really search for it but I'm pretty sure it ended up being one of my better projects for the class. After graduating, my photography definitely took a bit of a back burner and I really wasn't taking many pictures. Even though I wasn't taking pictures, I kept looking for stickers, they were so hard to miss now. When I got my digital camera at the start of 2015, the sticker project was just so easy to slip back into. And now that I have almost two years worth of stickers, I've decided to put them out there for all to share in my minor obsession.
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Maggie Ondrey
An amateur photographer and writer capturing a small portion of the city. Archives
August 2017
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