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was an inspiration which arose solely from the memory I had of it, seemingly out of nowhere, with the impression it originally made on me.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