Red Crates
By Findo
22 Feb 2007
Soon after I purchased my first DSLR, I set myself a project to "get out there" and take some shots. I decided to photograph red things that I came across on my walk to the train station. As it happened, a number of the red things I saw were actually red bread and milk crates. From there, I began to see more and more of these crates around the city, and eventually decided to abandon the red project and focus on red crates. Initially, I was attracted to the idea of the crates, as they struck me as having innate artistic merit. More often than not, they are simply thrown into the street behind a cafe, landing in interesting and random ways, becoming, in effect, random sculptures reflecting the inner city urban environment. If they are placed by the cafe owners, they often create interesting patterns and geometry. My rule was to never set-up a shot, only to capture existing scenes, which preserved the aleotoric nature of the series, and made the "hunt" even more enjoyable.
As I continued with the series, I became quite well known for my red crates amongst fellow photographers, and often, they began to shoot them in my honour.
The crates became a little bit of an in-joke, and began to take on lives and characters of their own. This allowed me to infuse humour into the series, when I found crates in interesting or unusual situations.
The majority of my shots come from inner-city Sydney, but when overseas, I kept and eye out and came up with a few shots. However, they do seem to be an Australian phenomenon.
I still shoot red crates, but it is quite challenging now to shoot them in new and interesting ways.
It has been an excellent project, and I have moved on to shoot numerous other projects since, a number of which have been quite fruitful.
Starting a project, even with something as mundane as a milk crate can be very rewarding.
