A real life location that was not here..

Resident Alien. Part 7.

 

From the moment my consciousness came online comic books were there and they were one of the first things in the outside world that I reached out for as a child. One day in 1977 I was at the local newsagents with my friend and his punk rock big brother and I saw a small stack of Marvel comics at the end of the magazine rack and I headed straight for them. In our grey Garrison town full of army barracks stained by rain these comics looked like they had just materialized from another dimension and I remember wanting one so badly that it felt like a need. I only managed to flick through a couple of issues before I was bumped out of the way by the big brother who wanted to take a look for himself and under the watchful eye of the shop keeper he pawed through them with his dirty fingers made shiny by solvents and sniffing with the turn of every page. 

American comics were a rare sight for us in the UK then and only a few newsagents carried any titles and no title was ever regularly in stock so you had to buy from what was available and the choices were always limited. The punk rock big brother bought two and on the walk home he would not let me look at them or tell me which one’s he’d bought and I harassed him all the way. About a week later I was standing at our front gate talking with the dog next door when the big brother walked over to us and pulled one of the comic books out of his back pocket, rolled it up tight like a relay baton until its pages squeaked, then he slapped it into my hand and told me I could keep it.

Marvel Comics retold the old stories, the myths of gods and mortals, with elemental battles between good and evil being fought on the streets or high above the skyscrapers of New York City, which was then, in my mind, filled with superheroes. Comic books put America right into my hands and I felt it viscerally. Unlike the America on TV where nothing at all ever felt real, comic books were actual things that I could touch and carry with me and look at anywhere I wanted. They were like cultural artifacts from another world that was just as captivating for me as the comic book characters themselves. Even the ads, for the secret agent spy camera, live sea monkeys and x-ray spex captured my imagination. There was a wild creative fantasy taking place at a real life location that was not here where I lived. Comic books opened up one of the first true portals in my life and I have felt lucky to have been transported.

A few years later I found my way to the homegrown renegade sci-fi prophecies of 2000AD weekly and I read it without hardly missing an issue until I was in my 20's. When many of its most beloved artists and writers later left to join Vertigo Comics in the USA, I vicariously followed their careers out there too and I kept reading the graphic novels they published. Notably, but not in any way limited to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Grant Morrison’s Invisibles and Alan Moore’s Watchmen. These UK comic book artists and writers went on to revitalize the medium and changed the perception of comics in the wider culture in much the same way as the ‘British Invasion’ of bands from the 1960’s did with American music. For me this creative cross pollination between UK and American artists has always been an exciting one and part of my own family history.

Give the medium its texture..

Resident Alien. Part 6.

 

I remember an interview with Brian Eno once where he was talking about how the charm of each new technology will be remembered by the limitations inherent in it and it will be these flaws which will give that technology its own unique signature. For example; vinyl by its crackles and scratches, film by its grain, tapes by their background hiss, video by its colour bars and digital by its glitching artifacts. These imperfections which we spend our time today trying to iron-out or side-step are actually the very essence of a medium and, in retrospect, will be seen as part of the unique beauty that came from working with it. These limitations will give the medium its texture which will lend itself to a project's final realization. This texture will then become the baseline reading we associate with an authentic experience of it.

I was excited to be shooting with my new digital Leica (a D-Lux 3) and without the burden of film, processing or expense I was led away by my own enthusiasm with my camera set to program. I only needed to point, compose and shoot and this felt liberating and pure. I had been photographing for over a year this way and when I sat down to edit the work I really did not know what I was doing. I damaged many of my original image files by saving horrifically edited images over the top of them. Even when I did later learn some things, I actually decided to keep the same camera settings with the rationale of staying consistent, telling myself jpegs were the equivalent to working in 35mm anyway and I’d change the settings to something else when my Greencard arrived. 

Doing this has in fact now bound this work together as a single entity and sacrificing some resolution for consistency over time has worked for it. With the projects clear parameters, it spanned 4 years and my entire immigration process. While the US department of homeland security investigated me, I investigated the US with my camera. The photos I made were my attempt to establish a context for myself psychically in my new country of residence while the government attempted to determine my presence legally. Although none of these actual facts about the collection are directly depicted in any single photo, they are nevertheless, for me, an integral part of its psychological profile, the secret narrative below everything, its code..

With a primary jpeg colour palette and the vision field compressed by the even light of flash, I composed pictures using bright or clear forms on the camera's small LCD screen which was held mostly at arm's length. This was a first for me and I framed the world already flattened and rendered by technology, rather than through a viewfinder where it was my own perception and the theatre of “reality” playing out inside the frame. Subject and composition were my only concern now and with seemingly unlimited memory I could afford to indulge any photo-notion that arose along the way and I consider this whole period between 2008-2012 as a joy-filled photographic experiment. Today, when I view this collection it reminds me of an epic graphic novel that has been cut up into all its individual panels then mixed together and it was now my job to reassemble it into a coherence that is still yet to be determined.