Bounce around and conjure..

Resident Alien. Part 10.

Nick Waplington. Safety in Numbers.

 

For some reason I've been thinking about Nick Waplington's book Safety in Numbers again. I have not looked at this book since it was published in 2000 but when I remembered it (in 2012) it was as an international Gen-X travelog. It was a book packed with photographs that seemed to bounce around between Europe, Asia and the US and conjured its narrative through seemingly scattered images placed strategically throughout it. What also came to mind then, and of particular interest to me now, was the repetition of a certain type of portrait that was included; color, flash, heavily cropped close ups of people who, if I remember correctly, were on MDMA and that these portraits were made on a dance floor. They suggested too, by their framing and focus, that Nick was perhaps also high when he took them. 

These were compelling images for me 23 years ago and I may be way off in my recollections today of my interpretation then, but that is ok because the book got me thinking about my own Resident Alien series, which I had just then begun editing. It unlocked an avenue of exploration into some of the grammar of sequencing with an example of how to meter a book of, what was essentially, free verse. I haven’t looked at Safety in Numbers in over 20 years and haven't really thought too much about it for 10 of them, but at that time, in 2012, its ghost was an inspiration which arose solely from the memory I had of it, seemingly out of nowhere, with the impression it originally made on me. I have no idea what I would think about this book if I sat down with it today, but I intend to order a decent second hand copy when I finish writing this and find out what the heck this reoccurring memory of a memory of a book is all about and why I am thinking about it again today..

All Photographs in this post by Nick Waplington

As gnarly and dubious as it is..

Resident Alien. Part 9.

I found this photo in a packet of prints that had been discarded from the original Resident Alien selection. Prints that did not make it up onto the wall as part of the final 2012 edit. This photo was in the first of 2 packets of rejects that I opened and I found it near the front. Seeing this photograph made me realize immediately that I would now need to go back and carefully review all of the original memory cards from this period and start my selection there, at the very beginning and from scratch. I had wondered if I could pick up on the trail of this 2012 print edit after first reacquainting myself with it, with the intention of returning to the original digital files later, to simply locate each image for re-editing and printing.

Having this original edit as 4x6 inch prints has been helpful for me to envision the volume of the pictures I am working with and it has been fun moving them around into pairs and pages to see how this looks here and what that looks like there. I’ve been enjoying myself and in the process I am indeed reacquainting myself with it. Pairs and spreads gravitate to one another while others wait in the wings for second thoughts. I’ll get an idea of what it needs and what I might need to keep an eye out for later. 

It's true that right now this selection is incomplete and long out of date and catching this photo in a discarded package confirms this. The prints were originally made up of all my favorite images from 2012 and I was a different person back then. In the last 10 years I have changed and my tastes have changed too. Even after initially sorting the prints into roughly 2 distinct piles of “yeps and nopes”, my pile of nopes was over twice the size of the yeps pile. This tells me my personal criteria for judging what I believe makes a “good” picture has changed too, a lot.

 

I only have the vaguest memory of taking this photo (Omaha Nebraska, I think, but I cannot be sure) but it indicates there may well be more as yet undiscovered photos waiting to be found. This floating potential key image of interest, this missing link, as gnarly and dubious as it is, marks the very beginning of the process of really considering this body of work with fresh eyes.

Regarding all the variables..

Resident Alien. Part 8.

 

As a dyslexic I was naturally drawn to reading narratives through pictures and comic books found me wanting. Words on a page were difficult to hold still, especially if I was distracted. Each word vibrated then seemed to collapse inward on itself from both ends, letter by letter after first flipping backwards and exchanging places. No amount of focus could keep them from doing it and everything was ineligible to me. I’ve sometimes wondered if reading via the reflection in a mirror might have helped me then because It all felt wired that way somehow. To really read took special circumstances. I had to be alone and it had to be quiet, which was rare in our house in those days, but I savored the moments when I found them. From one comic book panel to the next I tracked superheroes locked in battle as they tumbled down colourfully inked pages whilst regarding all the variables carefully along the way. Everything within the frame was essential and significant and I searched the artworks for signs and symbols with which to build a coherent narrative of my own from.

I wasn’t officially diagnosed as dyslexic until I was 19 years old and my entire life at school suddenly made a sick kind of sense. I could write but did not read well. My vocabulary was beyond my years, but I couldn’t spell any of it. I’d been pulled out of classes to show my work to people who were not teachers and tell them about the things they pointed to in my exercise books. For years I’d been bumped around from regular classes to remedial classes and back again with no apparent logic or explanation and I will never in my life forget the holy brutal horror hell of sight reading in front of a class full of vicious adolescent Droogs. Visits to the school psychologist followed this, but I think that was for another issue altogether..