Time has grown wild in my bones..

 Resident Alien. Part 11.

For the last few days I have been using the Flickr Organizer’s “randomly arrange” button again. The Resident Alien photos were the first images I posted online (between 2008-2013) and back then it was new work that I was sharing. When I returned to Flickr 7 years later after not being able to access my account this series was still there waiting for me and one of the first things I did was delete ¾ of it. I then added my favorite pictures from what was left to a separate album. It was this album containing 500 images which I loaded into the organizer to be randomized. 

I’ve called this process slot machine sequencing and assembling an edit this way crosses wires in my head thinking about it. I am both near and far from this work. Far meaning in terms of years that I have been separated from it and near because in that time it has grown wild in my bones. The chance pairings that this randomizing process generates and the eerie coincidences of form, collisions of colour or subject, forces my attachments to the photos, whatever they may be, to separate from any trace of narrative I may have already imposed on it. I am seeking to disrupt my relationship to the edit and see it from an alternative perspective, to see it as a whole somehow, unfamiliar and strange and without bias for its individual parts. It stirs up ideas and feelings which I believe lay at the heart of its making and opens up the spaces between the photographs, where I lived my life at that time.

This is how I hope the work's true narrative will emerge, but right now it is too soon to say. This randomizing element is essential for me, it forces me inside myself to make new connections between the photographs. The more random the combination of images together, the harder I must try to connect them. It is like a narrative building work-out, a storytelling improvisation that pushes against my instincts and asks questions about my intentions for it. It highlights images that I have always loved and wanted to keep, that I felt belonged there, but now no longer have a place. 

Most of these random sequence spins are without much revelation, but now and again something interesting happens (and all 10 of the previous posts concerning this series are illustrated with examples of this randomizing process). What I will eventually use in terms of sequencing remains to be seen at this stage, but the process itself feels like a necessary one. It is a game of chance that uses impulse, intuition and sometimes intoxicants to play by rules I cannot put into words to an end I cannot yet see.  

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