| When I was a child my grandmother would take me fishing by the steel mills in Baltimore. Sometime around noon the fish would stop biting and I would pace the lengths of the pier with her camera making photographs of jellyfish and minnows. Weeks later, she would scold me for wasting film when the prints revealed nothing but the reflection of the noonday sun and sky on the waters surface. It didn’t bother me; I knew what lay beneath the shiny façade. Guided by a vague sense of intuition and empathy, I’m looking hard at the things we think are easy to ignore. The landscape, thought to be so repetitive and lifeless, is quite the opposite. | 
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John Lehr
John Lehr, Crumpled Cheese Burger Sign, 2008. Pigmented inkjet print 30ââ¬Âx40ââ¬Â, Courtesy of the artist and Kate Werble Gallery.When I was a child my grandmother would take me fishing by the steel mills in Baltimore. Sometime around noon the fish would stop biting and I would pace the lengths of the pier with her camera making photographs of jellyfish and minnows. Weeks later, she would scold me for wasting film when the prints revealed nothing but the reflection of the noonday sun and sky on the waters surface. It didn’t bother me; I knew what lay beneath the shiny façade.
Guided by a vague sense of intuition and empathy, I’m looking hard at the things we think are easy to ignore. The landscape, thought to be so repetitive and lifeless, is quite the opposite. We’ve dreamed this place into being through a collective craving for convenience and distraction—and our anxieties and desires are visible on every surface, like weeds breaking through a new patch of concrete.
I try to create that split-second awakening, when a mirage appears in a desert of monotony and things are revealed as familiar and full of wonder.
