George Perec's The Street

George Perec’s The Street encourages the reader to overanalyze their neighbourhood so much that it becomes alien to them. Perec wants the reader to think about their neighbourhood the planning, structure and implied rules that are expressed and present in the construction of street, a house, or a neighbourhood. Perec urges the reader to really look, not just look at the extraordinary things in their neighbourhood but the seemingly benign and boring elements of a neighbourhood that one passes off or ignores day to day. He even urges the readers to make a list of the things they see and hear in their community. Once they’ve “picked out what you’ve long ago picked out” (Perec, 105), “you still haven’t looked at anything” (Perec, 105). Perec reinforces …show more content…
All the moves left me feeling less connected with the idea of a neighbourhood I more associated my home with the location of my family and friends rather than the local area near my house and the space that followed the formal construction of a neighbourhood. This feeling is only aided by the neighbourhood that i currently live in, I live on the edge of the Musqueam Band lands in the south of Vancouver. This land holds a complex and important political space in Vancouver and British Columbia. The land was declared as their own officially on June 10th, 1976. The land is technically not city land and is therefore policed by the RCMP and Musqueam Security which makes the neighbourhood feel disconnected from the rest of the city. The neighbourhood drastically changes in mood from morning to evening, during the day the forest in intriguing and beautiful, populated by dog walkers and the occasional horse rider. In the evening the forest is pitch black and eerie, while the streets spotted with few street lights feel intimidating and …show more content…
I plan on taking many photos of my neighbourhood during the evening and during the day in order to capture the polar opposite feeling of day and night in my community. I would take the photos with thirty-five millimetre colour film and print the images at sixteen by twenty (inches) size. The work would be exhibited in a room modelled to look like a street. The room would have a road painted down the middle and the photos hung above fake curbs on either side of the room. This would give the viewer the idea that they’re looking at a street and comparing either side of the street due to the natural divided of the dotted line down the road and the difference between the photos taken in the evening on one side of the room and the photos taken during the day on the other.The large size of the photos would allow the viewer to see a high degree of detail in the photos drawing them in and encouraging them to analyze the scenes presented in the images. The work would take a week to shoot and then a few days to print, the cost would be low due to the fact that I already have a camera I would just need to purchase the film and the photo paper. The project could easily be completed by myself