Turnstile is an idiosyncratic photographic project created by me, David Wills. The site has been designed so that images are thrown up from a massive database of works, either at random or in a particular sequence – it all depends what page you’re on and what you select.
I chose Turnstile as the name for my site because turnstiles are things that many of us use every day but rarely notice. My first memory of using a turnstile was at the Royal Easter Show in Sydney. The turnstile was the point where I left behind one world and was transported to another one, a world of wonder, excitement and frivolity.
Turnstile the website is a virtual wunderkammer, an ongoing survey of ‘cultural mulch’, the ephemeral things we see but fail to notice: the odd or the boring, the everyday, and the intriguing. Drawn from an ever increasing archive of digital imagery, Turnstile relies on my street-level interaction in public spaces for a limitless supply of images, and snippets of overheard conversations, gripes and occurrences, most considered too unimportant to be captured on microchip (but not anymore!). You could say I’m keeping an eye on things and sharing what I see.
Turnstile has been archived by the National Library of Australia as part of the Pandora Australian web archive project and is a featured link on the Australian Centre for Photography website. Dive in, and enjoy.
Acknowledgements Granular David Wills