Altered States of Agoraphobia: I Have Always Been Here Before

Saturday, January 26, 2013

I Have Always Been Here Before

Thursday January 23rd marked five years since I arrived in America. Over this time I have been fortunate enough to visit 29 of it's States and been able to make photographs in most of them. It is this journey which I have documented (sporadically) here in this blog. America has come as one of the great inspirations of my life, both personally and artistically. With a profound feeling of both strangeness and familiarity it has often crossed my mind, that, in whatever previous incarnation I might have had, traveling to America is a journey which I have somehow always ended up making. It echo's right through me too, out of viscera and into dreams, with images of a flickering succession of sea vessels, down through the wormhole of history and back to it's discovery. Now Today, with a strange sense of deja vu, I heard myself whisper; "I have always been here before".

1 comment:

Faris ZahidOctober 13, 2021 at 9:06 AM
The article written is really great and informative. will be looking further for these type of posts. Thanks.
Agoraphobia
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Welcome

About the photographs: These images are a search for a personal orientation between the dream or idea of a place and my actual experience of it in reality. They can be described as a collection of psychic coordinate points which I have plotted between the imagined America I brought with me from England and the real America I found on my arrival in 2008. These images are half truth and half fiction. They are a psychogeography, filled with personal symbolism and tangled with influences so old they were already part of me long before this journey ever began.

A note about the title:  The compulsion to travel, to move from one place to another, has been with me my whole life. Whether it be local, national or international, I have always found myself either in motion or, if not, I have been dreaming about it. Paradoxically, it has been in the periods of dreaming that Agoraphobia, (which Google defines as “Extreme or irrational fear of entering open or crowded places, of leaving one's own home, or of being in places from which escape is difficult”) has gripped me and, at times, crippled me. These photographs are my continued (once secret) revolt against it in the United States of America today, despite recent quarantines.