gas meters

Gas meters are one of the these "infra-ordinary" urban things nobody notices, and photographing them obsessively over a period of about 4 years was an exercise in reversing the usual peripheral/focal perception. I became super-sensitized to them and started to appreciate their peculiar characters: some show a kind of ungainly spidery grace of awkward robots in early science fiction comics. Some aspire to elegance, some are bashful and hiding. I think of them as a type of Odradek - an indeterminate thing from one of Kafka's more enigmatic short stories. But they are also nodes of a vast urban network (of gas pipes), just like power switches, water taps, and bus stations, and thus collectively a machine for thinking about cities (and photography).

Marko Zivkovic