Resident Alien. Part 1.

For about a month I have been keeping a journal for a project I have started working on. It is sort of a process log and keeping this log it has since become part of that process. By writing about this project I have had the chance to consider it more carefully than I might have otherwise done and the process has been insightful. These insights are now helping to determine the shape of the project. I have already made several entries into this log, but in order to begin sharing it I have to first introduce it, give it some background and context. Please consider this, and whatever I am going to say next, as that introduction.

In 2012 I had an idea for a photobook, but life got in the way and the idea got pushed to one side and then buried under a decade. It was a collection of photos I'd made during the first 4 years I’d spent in the USA, beginning in 2008 and ending in 2012 with a change of camera. In all this time, as my life unfolded in ways I could never have predicted, my thoughts would sometimes return to this work and I promised myself when I finally arrived in a space to give it the focused attention it needed that I would try and honor it. How I was going to honor it exactly I did not yet know, but I was always having these drifting nebulous ideas for it and over time a few of these ideas began to gravitate to one another until, just recently, a sort of conception happened and I suddenly, in a flash, saw the whole completed thing floating in my head. 

In the decade of separation from this work I did not have access to it at all, but my memory of it was always strong and alive in my imagination and I found, through some kind of bedraggled remote viewing, I could work on it and it became an important part of my creative inner life and general sense of grounding. At other times when I’d think about this work I would wonder if it was even relevant anymore as so much time had passed since its making. It was in those moments that I’d realize, that was just me thinking in terms of it having an audience instead of what it really was, an object of my own heart's desire that I wanted to bring into being for myself. Why? because death is always coming and all the witnesses to the making of the photographs are now part of a parallel universe that I can no longer reach, unless..

 

Once another person views a photograph we have made it is no longer our own. We may know the circumstances which brought a photograph into being, including all its secrets and sorcery, but the photograph is now alive in the mind of another and the viewer will re-experience it personally as a private psychic event. The language of images is the language of our unconscious selves and they are made of the same stuff as our dreams. A photograph's location, subject and forms may be taken directly from life, but the photographer, when framing the image, brings all the arcane symbolism of their own unconscious self to it. To make pictures is an attempt to speak in the language of these dreams and we as photographers have often had to lose ourselves in them along the way to find such pictures. 

In the same way that faces and animals can be seen in passing clouds and frozen in the limbs of trees during the phenomenon of Pareidollia, so the collective unconscious belongs to all of us and we can therefore communicate with one another using it. Photographs are ghost chambers, filled with our shared signs, symbols and subjective phantom archetypes. They are part of the fabric of the reality from which our world is made and our relationship to them plays an important part in making our lives coherent. They are true shared experiences and give our waking selves an opportunity to consciously dream when viewing them. We live in dreams after all, everything we have ever made, created or built, began in the unconscious in the same way as dreams are the real world we create within ourselves when we sleep..

At the end of our street, beyond the washing lines..

The 3rd poster on my childhood bedroom wall in 1976 was of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda from the movie Easy Rider. They were riding their Choppers, side-by-side through what looked like the same New Mexico landscape where I was standing that day in Taos in 2018. The poster was shot from a following car and it looked out at them across polished chrome like the cultural icons they already were. This poster was pinned up on my wall above the ‘Cocktail Party’ poster and the best view of it was when I was sitting on the floor. Easy Rider was a relatively new movie then, released 7 years earlier in 1969, the year I was born. In their boots, shades, hats, and with wild hair blowing back, my kid self had no idea who these motorcycle cowboys were and my imagination roamed for a connection to them and, in our home at that time, it did not take me long to find one.

– 2nd paragraph retained by author – 

Looking back now, I can say with certainty that I was, in fact, raised by the characters of Easy Rider but the cast was British. There was no high, bright desert sun over vast cactus-covered landscapes in my story. Instead my childhood was a dark, gritty, and in some ways a supernatural tale, set against the backdrop of social housing in a Garrison town. Our small civilian rock-n-roll hilltop pocket was where Easy Rider's counterculture could still be found alive and well but it ended abruptly at the entrance to the tree plantation at the end of our street, beyond the washing lines, where all the land from there on out was owned by the Ministry of Defense. Tanks, helicopters and squaddies in fatigues were the everyday and commonplace in Tidworth, Hampshire in 1976. As were the puddles of blood outside the pubs in the morning from fights the soldiers had amongst themselves the night before. The motorcycles of my boyhood were Triumphs, Norton’s, and BSA’s and I never saw a Chopper anywhere else but in that poster. Our free festival was at Stonehenge and that year we watched the summer solstice sun rise between the stones. Where I remember a sea of people cocooned in brightly coloured sleeping bags scattered across a huge muddy field on the morning I got lost. An open tent with dub reggae playing from speakers mounted on stands outside. A plate of beans on toast eaten from the lap of oil stained jeans. A silver death's head ring. When Hawkwind took me in.

Dennis Hopper became the archetype of all the men that had a hand in raising me. It was his flickering image that slept on our couch for a year and smelled of Cocoa butter, engine oil and weed, with his book about Salvador Dali, he'd always let me read. It was him, in my memory, that took me to school in a motorcycle sidecar. It is his face that I remember playing Bob Dylan songs on a guitar from beginning to end at our kitchen table while howling like a dog. It was him that drove us to Wales in a Morris Minor van in search of magic mushrooms. It was him that introduced me to Marvel comics, the Mary Celeste and the curse of Tutankhamun. It was him that explained the closed loop timeline of the Planet of the Apes. And now I wonder, at this late hour, if the face that my imagination was actually roaming to connect with was really that of my father, who died in March that year, and who probably has more to do with all of this than I am willing to admit.

Altered States of Agoraphobia. 

Page 24 – (Bridge)

These pictures were taken at the Jesus Nazareno Cemetery in Taos, New Mexico, at the final resting place of Dennis Hopper, about a month after I arrived in Lenexa, Kansas, at the end of April 2018. My friends Don and Gene Hudson picked me up on their way through, driving down from Michigan. They were on their annual trip to visit family and friends that they had out there and Lenexa, Kansas was going to be on their way. It was not unusual for us to rendezvous like this and over the years we have met up several times on the road, close to wherever both of our paths were going to be crossing and it was always good to see their friendly and familiar faces out there in the middle of nowhere. It had been about a year since I last saw them and I was looking forward to catching up. I was still shell shocked from my recent experiences in south Missouri and the idea of joining them on a road trip was a good one. That rolling mosaic of distraction and focus that only a long car journey with a camera can bring was going to be the perfect medicine for my restless spirit. I was far away from myself in every way I could think of, but knew I’d be safe in the company of those I considered to be family and the soundtrack was guaranteed to be fantastic..

Note: Facing the above photographs, if you now look over your right shoulder you’ll see the grave of Dennis Hopper and below is a picture I took of Don taking a photo of it. The photo he took is on the left.

 Jumpsuits and shoulder flags..

The 2nd poster that hung on my childhood bedroom wall was of the Apollo 11 Command Module floating in the Pacific ocean after returning to Earth from the Moon (below left). The 3 astronauts standing outside awaiting rescue in their jumpsuits and shoulder flags looking out at me in permanent out of focus bewilderment. (The Earthrise hung in our bathroom). This poster was pinned up high on the wall at the end of my bed and it was one of the first things I saw in the morning when I was waking up. Writing about this now has just sent me on a Google search looking for it, being curious to compare it to my recollections before I continue. In doing so I realize my memory of this image has been spliced with the memory of another image from that time. Namely the splashdown of the starship Icarus at the beginning of the 1968 movie Planet of the Apes, when the 3 surviving astronauts paddle for shore in an inflatable dinghy (below right). I suppose it does not take a giant leap of the imagination to connect these two and the movie does use imagery reminiscent of those earlier space missions. I was an avid fan of Planet of the Apes as a kid and it was hard to avoid with 5 movies followed by a TV show and an excellent comic book all released in as many years (and equal to my entire life then). With all this mixed in with NASA's ongoing real life space program, my imagination was on a fertile ground to launch me on my own fantastic internal voyages. It was a place where science fiction and science fact fused and I understand why my memory did the same thing by splicing them together this way. Both this movie and the moon landing occurred within a year of my birth and were imprinted upon my awakening consciousness as recent cultural events in what was then, a pre Star Wars universe.

It is only the lean of time upon it..

In 1976 when I was 6 years old I had 3 posters on my bedroom wall that my mother had put up to keep me company and I suppose to also make me ponder. One was a painting of a cocktail party where all the guests had guns for heads. Every guest had a different gun identity and each hand held a different drink. When I was laying on my bed this poster was pinned on the wall directly to my right and I could touch it when I reached out. At my tender age I didn’t know anything about guns or drinks, but its message was clear to me. By associating a thing with a person and a person with a thing everyone is a potential killer no matter what drink they happen to be holding, or thereabouts anyways. I’ve searched for this image online several times over the years, but strangely I am still yet to find it. The screenshot above is the result of my latest search. Sometimes I think I might have simply imagined it and it is possible that I have somehow. Gaslighted by my own psyche. It is one of the first memories I have of looking at an image, but I also know that remembering doesn’t necessarily make it true or real and it is only the lean of time upon it that has made it so.

 

When we look at a photograph in front of us it is already fully formed and ready for connection. This initial comprehension of an image happens in approximately the same fraction of a second that it takes to make the original exposure. A photograph always stands in stark contrast to our own present world where it is being viewed, like an alien artifact that time has turned up before us. We have no control over an images impact upon us because images bypass all conscious firewalls and find their place inside us, connecting to what is already waiting to receive them. The image's innate ability to make us believe them is powerful because we want to believe them and when we do believe them we declare them as a personal truth, even if that truth is noticing its deception.. 

Altered States of Agoraphobia is available to order here