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joseph squier
Urban Diary was a long-form, multi-modal meditation on the poetics of everyday life in the contemporary city. Conceived as both a record and an exploration, the work traverses streets, alleys, and rooftops, capturing the fragments of experience that accumulate within the architecture of urban spaces.
At its core, Urban Diary was less about documenting the city as it was and more about rendering the felt experience of being within it — its rhythms, textures, disjunctions, and fleeting revelations. It was a project shaped by the artist's long-standing interest in narrative structure, experimental media, and the interplay between public environments and private subjectivities. The diary form was crucial here — not as a chronological log, but as a conceptual framework that privileges the personal, the fragmentary, and the reflective. Each entry in Urban Diary was a visual or textual note, often paired or layered with others, that exists in relation to a larger, evolving collage of memory and observation. The work spans photographs, written text, and digital assemblages.
Rather than forming a linear sequence, the pieces interact non-hierarchically, inviting viewers to navigate the archive in ways that were intuitive, associative, and open-ended.
Urban Diary had its origins in the frequent walks made by the artist throughout San Francisco and the random artifacts he often came across, either lost or abandoned, of anonymous lives – torn calendar pages, lists of things to do, legal notices, snapshots. This archive, suplemented by the artist’s own images, notes, and audio recordings was the starting point for the project. Urban Diary became a meditation on what often goes unnoticed in the flow of a modern city: a discarded glove on a fire escape, the low hum of traffic beneath an overpass, the flicker of fluorescent light through a diner window at dusk, fragments of overheard conversation. These are the experiences that were later assembled into layered visual fields, designed not to illustrate a specific place but to evoke the psychological atmosphere of urban space — its simultaneity, anonymity, beauty, and estrangement.
Photography had always been central to the artist's work, and in Urban Diary, it functions not as a documentary tool but as a generative surface — a site for layering, manipulation, and juxtaposition.
The artist often digitally altered the images or embeded them within larger visual composites. In some instances, images were augmented by poetic text snippets, a process of layering that allowed the final image to hold multiple timescales: the moment of capture, the act of reflection, and the resonance of memory. The city became both backdrop and protagonist — an environment that shapes human behavior while absorbing its traces.
Thematically, Urban Diary engaged with questions of displacement, anonymity, and routine. Cities are paradoxical spaces: they teem with human life yet often amplify isolation; they promise connection while enforcing boundaries. The artist was interested in how we navigate this complexity, how we maintain interiority amid the sensory overload of urban life. The diary form, again, became a method of reclamation, a way of asserting presence within a space that tends to erase the individual.
Many of the visual and textual fragments in Urban Diary operate in the register of the overlooked. They linger on texture, surface, pattern. These elements speak not to grand narratives of urban development or decay, but to the quiet endurance of place. By focusing on the marginal and the ephemeral, the aim was to challenge dominant visual tropes of the city and foreground a more intimate, phenomenological experience of space.
The Urban Diary interface mimiced the nonlinear movement of urban wandering. The screen became a site of drift, allowing the audience to browse, pause, return, and veer — much like walking city streets without a predetermined destination. It recalled the Situationist practice of the dérive, but inflected through a personal, memory-saturated lens.
The work was also deeply inspired by the artist's readings in literature, particularly prose poetry and experimental narrative, reflecting a long-held fascination with the fragment as a narrative device — its ability to suggest without resolving, and a method to create space for the reader/viewer’s imagination to complete the gesture.
In Urban Diary, the artist used this strategy to allow each viewer a different route through the material. There was no single story being told. Instead, the accumulation of fragments became a kind of architecture, a structure through which a plurality of meanings could emerge.
As an artist working across disciplines — visual art, digital media, and writing — the artist was continually exploring the border between media. Urban Diary was perhaps most fully realized in the space where these forms intersect. A photograph became a page became a screen; a piece of text became image; a sound became spatial. The artist was interested in how these transformations not only expand the formal language of the work but also allow for richer emotional and sensory engagement.
The diary, in this sense, became not merely a record but a porous, evolving interface between self and world.
One of the enduring questions that animates Urban Diary was: what does it mean to notice? And more pointedly, what does it mean to notice in a culture increasingly saturated with images, data, and noise? The project was, in part, an attempt to slow down the perceptual apparatus, to encourage attentiveness, reflection, and even a kind of visual empathy.
By curating moments of stillness or ambiguity within the image, the artist invited viewers to dwell in uncertainty, to look again, to remain with what might at first appear trivial.
In a time when cities were increasingly sites of conflict, displacement, and ecological precarity, Urban Diary was not intended as a sociological study or a political treatise. But the artist hopes it functions, in its own quiet way, as a gesture of attention, an argument for the value of the ephemeral, the personal, and the poetic in our understanding of urban life. By lingering in these interstitial spaces, we might begin to see the city anew, not just as a landscape of infrastructure, but as a complex, living text.