this website was created by lauren kent, currently a freshman at the gallatin school of individualized study at new york university with a concentration in behavioral genetics and photography, as a final project for nyu's tisch school of the arts fundamentals of photography I class, in april 2001.

the fifteen images that are linked on the map are photographs i took while walking between my apartment at third avenue and eleventh street and my job in nyu's bobst library at washington squares south and east. this is a route i have walked hundreds of times in the past eight months, as it is not only the path to my workplace, but also, at least partially, to my classes, organizations, and friends. it is a route that easily could have grown dull and visually exhausted.

but for me, it hasn't.

last semester, i was almost obsessed with the concept of the ordinary versus the everyday. the everyday, i posited, was just that - things we experience on a regular basis. what separated the everyday from the ordinary was its importance to us - whether we attached any value to the most mundane of occurrences. after much deliberation, i concluded that as long as we could find some sort of beauty in the everyday, it would never become boring.

these images are things i see daily - bicycles, flower plantings, various streetside garbage - but despite the fact that it is constantly within my view, i am still overjoyed when the sunlight that filters between buildings falls onto a metal coil in a certain way, casting an array of intricate shadows. and as long as i can find some beauty in the sensations that strike me every day, my walk to work will never be boring.

this project would have been impossible (or at least much more difficult) without the help of certain individuals, and to them i owe my greatest thanks:

to erika, for letting me play with pixels and code instead of matboard and art paper;
to my father, for teaching me photoshop in sixth grade, and for having an extremely convenient ftp server;
to lee, for lending me her laptop so we don't have to cram twenty people into a tiny office;
to wood, for putting up with my incessant scanning;
and to tali, for being the most talented map-mutilater on the face of the earth.