Considering how most approach art viewing today, mine may never become recognized. It will reveal itself neither at a glance, nor through some
idea said to underlie it. The viewer must instead view every image, slowly, then again, and then compare their shapes and colors to those of adjacent
images, of others nearby, then of others more distant. An integrated world comes alive with interconnected networks of similar and contrasting
forms and implied movements, as varied spaces gradually emerge.

In earlier states of being in the individual and in our species, the separations that drive our lives and our culture today had not yet appeared.
In infancy, we have not yet learned to differentiate self from the world, and in a far earlier period of human civilization, before the emergence of
writing, one can guess that life was mostly lived on a more primary and direct level, as objects were seen through the eyes of the observer rather than
through the mediation of words or constructed images.

Wholeness can only be a dream for us today, and can no longer be literally present. Thus I seek to connect images by artificial manipulations, such
as juxtaposing two so that lines in one will continue across the other, or so that shapes and colors rhyme or contrast. Yet all things are connected.
The same elementary particles constitute all substances; the carbon atoms in coal are identical to those in living beings. The world is in truth whole,
and it is our minds that divide it against itself.

On March 1, 2021, I began photographing a different group of images on each day of a single or related subjects. These are mostly in Chicago,
from weeds in a vacant lot a block from my apartment to downtown skyscrapers, but also images from far northern Newfoundland, to London,
Paris, and Istanbul. One desire was to lead viewers to a vision always trying to expand its reach, to include more, to, quoting the protagonist of
Rossellini’s Europe 51, “make our love bigger until it embraces everyone.”

The twelve images are edited into different types of art works, four each into Weeks, Months, and Years. No image is repeated among these,
though all twelve are also presented together in three differently-arranged grids in Days-12 works. I hope that seeing one image in relation to the
others creates a stretching effect in the mind, with each image reaching out to the larger context of the others, reminding us remind us that no one
image contains a solitary truth. Wholeness returns for a moment.

Fred Camper
Chicago, Illinois
August 15, 2024.