The Sketch Book @therubbishproject - Tumblr Blog

Every picture was taken in 3 views - without the mirror, with the mirror and the front view of the building.

In the after edit, I merged the first two together to avoid any defects on the mirror and edited the building view on top of my own reflection.

Initially, I wanted the mirror to hover in the air, but it made the image seem flat, so I abandoned the idea.

Story. Explained.

So I've spent the last month in a small village called Dubuļi. Located at the Eastern side of Latvia, it has a population of about 100. The village is a perfect example of the way everything changed overnight in the field of agriculture when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. As a small village in the Latvian countryside, Dubuļi was the perfect location for the growth of crops under the Soviet agricultural infrastructure. Farms, sawmills and other places of work were offered to the locals. Schools, clubs and cafes were the social hot-spots. Life in the village community was care-free and secure up until the 1980's.

The break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 had a great effect on the village. The sudden capitalist ideology and subsequent privatisation made a lot of people that were employed by the soviet organizations unemployed overnight. Such organizations included most of the factories, sawmills, and farms. As the main source of income was now gone, people moved away to the cities nearby, leaving the village almost abandoned.

I spent July and August learning about the village and the people living in it. Initially, I thought I could capture the socially anthropological and economical essence of the person in a digital collage. By looking at the things owned by a person, I was trying to show the direct connection between the person and their commodities. Soon after, I realised it was too much of a personal insight and it didn't reflect the bigger picture. I wanted to capture the essence of the dynamic life of a commodity. Obviously, the life of a commodity is directly linked to a person or a community.

Whilst living in the village, I noticed all of the abandoned buildings. I started questioning locals and found out that all of the buildings have been crucial social and economical parts of the community, or simply important attachments to a rural household in the past.

I found it fascinating how quickly a building can lose its purpose completely. A house is a place built by people for people. Every building is built for a purpose. It cannot be disposed of like everyday rubbish. If the building is abandoned, it's there until the natural ravages of time get to it. This relates to my previous concept of time. The building is an evidence of the past [the function], won over by the present [abandonment], open to the unknown [the future].

I thought that in this case the buildings could reflect both the commodities and the community, because they're closely related. In the finished photographs, they're edited in the reflection of a mirror. By doing so, I'm getting "both sides" of the story. The background is the direct view out of the front entrance of the building and the mirror breaks the picture up. The visual solution lets the viewer see the surroundings as well as the building, therefore it reflects on the local community in a subtle way.

#dubuļi