This work is documentary in the sense that I find what I need every day in the street. But I frame what I see not just to record a moment of experience but to accentuate the strange poetry of the world around me. When I look around the city I live in, I see the whole of America writ large in its horrifically beautiful weirdness: excesses of wealth and poverty, consumption and compassion, religiosity and true religion.

I don't believe in the false dichotomy of realism surrealism. So often the strangest moments I photograph seem so routine to the people in the middle of them, like the two medieval sword fighters with a swimsuit model looming in the background or the giant cartoon-like fireman. Or conversely, how often the mundane can seem suddenly mysterious or ridiculous, like the photograph I took of the Public Storage graveyard.

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"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

-W.B.Y.

All Photographs Copyright © 1999-2007 Peter Snyder