A few years ago I started to notice that safety cones were appearing in some of my street photography. Of course, they are designed to be highly visible, to alert us to the presence of perceived danger, to keep us separated from danger or perhaps just to reduce the likelihood of litigation.
I then started to notice them more and more and I realised that a kind of paradox existed with regard to them. They were seemingly so ubiquitous, yet I felt that others didn’t realise this. It’s like people were blind to their general presence and yet would seem to obey them almost subconsciously.
Safety cones are the detritus of road and building work. Assembled in highly visible reflective lines, they warn of impending danger, of hazards ahead. Safety cones separate pedestrians from cars, divert traffic around trenches and potholes and delineate building sites and safe paths to walk. They speak of emergencies, construction, development and sometimes progress.
I found it a curious aspect of our society that the risk posed to a pedestrian, for example, by a large yellow excavator could be mitigated by the presence of one or more knee-high orange cones. That, to me, was equally as absurd as finding one atop a ten-metre pine tree. Yet the cones themselves, especially when new and upright, have this sentinel-like quality, like they believe in the altruistic nature of their assignment.
Then, of course, there are those that are downtrodden and squashed, lonely and lost. Those whose assignments are over yet nobody packed them up and took them home.
These images continue a tradition of observational photography practised by Melbourne’s street photographer Jesse Marlow and made famous by Magnum photographer Elliot Erwitt. It was Erwitt who described photography as the art of ”finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them”.
The cones’ orange and yellow fluorescence anchors my images giving them context and form amid a background pallette of subtle city greys and bitumen blacks.
Jon Reid
Predominantly Orange
Edition of 350 · 24x18cm · 88 pages
Perfect Bound with reflective safety-cover
Weekend portfolio selected by Jean-Luc Monterosso.
