About Common Ground By Mads Holm

As an ongoing series by the peripatetic photographer, ‘About Common Ground’ is not from a single city or a single time: but its renderings of urban space feel no less familiar because of it. People bustle through intersections, lonely juice boxes line the shelves at Carrefour, a child stands holding a gun he probably shouldn’t touch. In essence a documentary series, “I believe we can learn so much from properly looking at things instead of taking them for what they immediately seem to be.” ‘About Common Ground’ is simultaneously melancholic and absurd; laughable because it so keenly illustrates reality.

Holm looks for what is happening beyond the seen, in a recent interview about the project he remarked, “I believe we can learn so much from properly looking at things instead of taking them for what they immediately seem to be.” Images that are taken just moments apart populate the series, and his depth of seeing is evident in these and the diversity of his subject matter; from an almost painterly still life of vegetables in a blue bag, to an auditorium filled with people wearing life jackets and a mewing blue-eyed kitten held by gloved hands — they’re extraordinary in their mundanity.