Pim Leewis

The Netherlands, 1993

There are more and more places where people are just passers-by. Where the emotional connection is lost with the landscape. For example airports, hotel rooms, and highways. You could define these places as “non-places”. A non-place is a neologism devised by the French anthropologist Marc Augé to refer to anthropological places where people remain anonymous and that are not important enough to be seen as a destination. There is no collective memory of these places but everyone passes through non-places every once in a while. Non-places connect the destinations within our daily life. In my work, I focus on these non-places, in order to draw attention to and show the beauty of these landscapes.

To explore the concept of non-places I started with focusing on the highway. I’ve been fascinated with the highway from an early age. The highway is an vain that can only be accessed via the official access roads. Even entering the adjacent landscape is almost impossible due to fences, locks or soggy verges. These photos show my first exploration of my project on non-places.