Civil Abstraction is a way to talk about the act of photographing the public order of anonymized life in the urban environment.
Civil Abstraction is an outgrowth of the writings of Erving Goffman, one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th century. Goffman coined the term Civil Inattention to describe how people behave in public. Rather than either ignoring or staring at others, Civil Inattention involves the unobtrusive and peaceful scanning of others so as to allow for neutral interaction. Civil inattention is utilized to maintain the public order and make privacy possible within a crowd, an essential feature of impersonal relationships demanded by the open society. Photographing in public is a violation of civil inattention.
Civil Abstraction leaves no question that the image itself is more dramatic than what was photographed. Exposing a colossal revelation into banal social interactions in public spaces – an onstage area where actors (individuals) appear before the audience. The scene’s narrative is negated and transplanted with a new dialogue created by the viewer.
Photography silently breaks through the conventions of Civil Inattention allowing for Civil Abstraction to be the hidden language of the chaotic theatrical performances that occur in public spaces. The desire to reconstruct reality in satiric, mutated and shattered forms is Civil Abstraction. This is the intersection of the real and the unreal that filters language through severance and disjuncture, the act of transforming the reality of the present moment into unreality.
Credits:
Michael Ray Nott