Location and Creativity

    Just about six months ago I moved from what was a gritty post industrial neighborhood that's been through several levels of gentrification to the very suburb area of Chestnut Hill. While I'm technically still with in Philadelphia's borders by a few feet it seems like I'm a hundred miles away, ok a 30 minute train ride away. My biggest concern with living in an environment like this was that my creativity was going to suffer, especially my photography. The transition of living in very large and open "artist" lofts measuring almost 3000 square feet to an 1100 square foot condo with individual rooms is something I'm still dealing with and most likely will for a while. Reason number one for this move is that renting anywhere near center city has become ridiculously expensive. Second is that the newer ever changing transient residents were not only boring 9 to 5'ers but they were succeeding in turning a once great area into the suburbs in which they came. So convincing myself that the city has changed and became to sterile wasn't that hard after all but sometimes I the residue of the past washed over me often leading to depression once I was out the front door. So as for creativity I'm painting more and have produced 80 paintings even though I'm limited to smaller canvas size because of a lack of real work space. Photography is something much different and difficult. I try to take as many photos as possible in my neighborhood but not in my gritty, high contrast style. Every once in a while I'll take the train back to center city to photograph but quickly become disappointed in what I see. Maybe I'm done with urban photography because urban doesn't exist anymore here, it's just a dense homogenized suburb for those that think it's cool to live in the city. I've tried to escape to New York City but it's no different and actually much worse.