The Daily Round / Martin Brink
Photographs from 2007-2009,
Size: 210 × 297 mm
Printing: black & white, laser printed, 49pp, spiral bound
Signed first edition of 50
ISBN 978-91-978250-0-9
Price: £20

More often than not photographs rely on some form of light to come into existence; whether produced by the flash of a machine or the glistening of the sun, light forms an essential element of all life.

We have come to associate the word life with movement and growth yet Martin Brink’s photographs in The Daily Round almost symbolise everything we already know; a world that seems to have stagnated through its own repetitive development as it constantly shifts toward an uncertainty that we have termed, the future. Brink says he was inspired to produce this work whilst at a gas station in the suburbs, and the idea of the gas station certainly provides the perfect analogy for this future. As a place that must exist so that we may travel further along the road of progress.

Comprised of varying materials these roads range from the precision layout of paved slabs and the familiar smoothness of inky black tarmac through to the textured rubble of a dirt road. The fluctuating debris of our lives is abandoned at the side of these roads, whether a fridge-freezer, a car or banana peel all of these objects constitute the remains of our activities.

The Daily Round seems to exist between two poles; on the one hand there is a desire for structure and order, which is constantly undermined by the opposing forces of a relentlessly shifting world, a haystack caught in the wind, clouds looming over the sea or rain on a window pane. At first these photographs appear to yield a stagnant and repetitive world, only after spending time with them do they slowly unfold. In a vase a flower waits silently to die; through a lattice of glass sunlight bleaches the film plane. This book intensifies these banalities of our world that we have become so familiar with yet the subtleties of ruin throughout reveal a deeper yearning for something more.

Just as the spiral binding of the book allows us to revisit and repeat the same banalities in a single continuous action, The Daily Round forms a quasi-record of a journey to report the unremarkable and fractured instances of our world. An instrumental diagram inscribed on a post, the word ‘SOAP’ embellished on a glass bottle, all of these shape a world of signs we rarely choose to notice. They exist for us just in case we lose our way along the many roads guiding toward the future, they are the unexceptional exceptions of every daily round.