Stomping Grounds: Senior Seminar Highlights Show
Lillian Maunsbach
I find that human instinct reacts to the familiar by neutralizing it—a strange survival tool that allows us to live in a city of thousands without becoming overwhelmed. We learn to overlook the expected in everyday life: the crowded sidewalk, the passing stranger, the shifting light. Yet there is something profoundly human in those shared moments we subconsciously dismiss. We move in parallel, sharing rhythms unnoticed.
My work examines the predictability of human behavior within an environment that, by its very nature, is unpredictable. I challenge the camera’s fixed rectangle, which confines what we see and frames the world into a single, contained perspective. By cutting, layering, and reassembling photographs, I break that boundary—extending the frame and creating compositions that reveal a larger pattern of collective movement. Through collage, I construct new spaces from fragments of the real, allowing New York City to reappear through repetition, rhythm, and unexpected alignments.
I’m drawn to people who seem at ease in their environment or unknowingly echo those around them. Over the course of a semester, I photographed candid, unstaged moments across New York City, working with natural light and at eye level to reflect the ordinary perspective often overlooked. These moments become the building blocks for the collages, which highlight the behaviors we register for a second and then immediately neutralize.
The work invites slow looking. It asks viewers to pay attention to posture, gesture, and the subtle choreography of the street—and to rediscover the shared, everyday humanity embedded within the city’s constant motion.