Photographer Sean Donnola’s latest project One Square Mile is on-view now at the Charles Moffett Gallery in New York until January 8th. In the spring of 2020 when we were all locked away in our homes the photographer embarked on a year long project with a single limitation: he was only allowed to shoot within one-square mile of his suburban New York home. The result was a body of work that highlights the beauty in the everyday objects. The show pays tribute to the ephemeral immediacy of the polaroid featuring stills of objects that are instantly recognizable like a metallic film packet to more abstract subject matters like stills from news footage of a forest fire.

Sean Donnola Untitled, 2021 Color instant print (Polaroid)

Sean Donnola Untitled, 2020 Color instant print (Polaroid)

“It was born out of meeting the moment in a way that felt organic and natural to me. I was in a small town very similar to the one I grew up in. The house was full of things from my childhood and in a way I went back home. I was able to tap into a lot of that feeling of strangeness and familiarity. There are things you see in your childhood that have a very specific connotation but then there are places that remind you of these places from our past that I find can be a disconnect and a connect. It’s kind of a complex way of looking at stuff,” Donnola says.

Donnola got his start making photos at the age of fourteen when a local photographer taught him how to set up a darkroom in his basement and from there it was like clock work. His work deals with the American visual landscape saying, “In my work a lot of the power of the experience of making it for me comes from connecting with these childhood visual memories of places I saw. I think there is something about the way children see the world and if you can tap into that as an adult artist it can really help you.”

There is power associated with the images people experience when they are young. Donnola recalls growing up in rural Vermont expanding on the fact that there is a lot of America that isn’t visually represented in the contemporary life of a city. There are places where things are not always new and people might grow up looking at the same things their whole life. This notion of finite things is what Donnola aimed to explore with One Square Mile.

“I wanted to test myself because my work is drawn so much from the everyday really leaning into the creative restriction of what can I do in such a small area and still, using my mind and imagination make it infinite for myself and that is what happens through the project for me,” he says.

Donnola’s newest project, though born out of physical confinement, ranges in subject matter. He produced over a thousand polaroids, eighteen of which have been carefully selected in order to create a body of work that borders on eerie and beautiful.

“For me it was really just about allowing my imagination and creativity to respond to something that is finite but in finite scenarios you can find infinite possibilities,” Donnola says.

One Square Mile is a true testament to the limitless possibilities of one’s imagination. During a time of great uncertainty Donnola found solace in the mundane activities of everyday life envisioning another world all within a single mile.