Frozen in the limbs of trees..

 

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..