The first hairline fracture to my psyche..

Resident Alien. Part 15.

Psychogeography Part 2.

"Psychogeography is the study of precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals". —- Guy Debord, 1955.

I discovered Psychogeography in 2010 not long after I moved to the USA. At that time I had just begun a personal protest against having to need a car to do absolutely everything and I had taken up walking everywhere instead. I was so serious about this protest that I had even quit my job at UPS to work in a grocery store that was only a 10 minute walk from my apartment. I had been living in America for about 2 years at that point and although I had taken a few significant road trips, I had simply had enough of all the local driving involved in my day to day city life when I was home. I felt like I knew the city of Tucumcari in New Mexico (which was over 600 miles away) better than I did my own home in Overland Park, Kansas. I’d even taken more photographs in Tucumcari than I had done in Overland Park and I had only been a tourist passing through. 

This demonstration against the use of an automobile was not concerned with any noble cause such as protecting the environment, but it was instead a protest that had been initiated out of a profound sense of dislocation that I had been feeling about my surroundings.

It was as if I had suddenly become overwhelmed by America’s sheer size and scale, having seen just enough of it to sustain the first hairline fracture to my psyche. I had found that in a car I was essentially unable to connect the various micro-destinations of my daily errands around Overland Park with the apparent non-places between them. Traveling from the library to a coffee shop, via the Mall, for example, became a hugely disorientating experience for me. These inter-zones were filled with all the familiar signs of American life, but appeared somehow absent of any living soul, except that is, for those souls that surrounded me in their own vehicles, separated from the world and separated from each other with their blank faces forward facing and ready to lurch to the next traffic light the moment the signal turned green. 

Sub-division followed sub-division, punctuated with fast food restaurants, gas stations and churches in a CGI landscape that was remote, manicured and as alien as the minds that I imagined to have designed it. Unreachable spaces to me somehow, like movies waiting to begin. And from my own paused life idling at the stoplight I could feel that old time prairie settlers' fear of infinity creeping into the comfortable 21st century confines of my air-conditioned Honda.

I found that these transitional spaces were measured (locally) in the time taken to cross them and not by the actual distance in miles, so depending on traffic and weather conditions this travel time (time travel) could obviously vary a lot. As my GPS bleeped me across the great motherboard city grid of Overland Park, Kansas, I obediently obeyed its every electronic command and headed in a direction that was never really clear to me. Every destination on my errand list was psychically located on the same flickering dream corner of the city. I could clearly visualize these destinations in my mind's eye, but I was absolutely clueless as to where they were on a map and how to get there without programming it into my GPS first.. 

This is what I meant by dislocation and I decided that the only way I was going to be able to orientate myself was to lose the car altogether and scale everything in my universe back to the neighborhood where I was living. So one morning I set out on what would be a series of long pre-planned walks with my camera..

Stabilizing my position against a sudden updraft..

Resident Alien. Part 14

Psychogeography. Part 1. (by way of introduction) 

Once upon a time in Weymouth, Dorset in 1991, I had forgotten I had an appointment for a root canal surgery and instead I smoked an eighth of hash via the hot knife method. It wasn’t until after all the coughing had stopped and the final Lebanese nug had been forged in fire and the plastic blast funnel dropped to the floor with an arm gone limp, did I remember so too. 

As the stage lights go up, Tommy’s smiling face emerges from the dispersing cloud of pot like a spirit making contact from the other side. His eyes were rolled back in his head, showing only the whites. His mouth was wide open and a loud dry clacking sound was coming out of it. The glint from one of his fillings winked back at me from a rusty molar in what appeared to be Morse Code, reminding me that even though I had moved my root canal appointment twice already, the pain was not going away no matter how much I smoked.

The dental surgery was across town and 20 minutes as the crow flies, but on foot it would take me twice that long. I’d have to weave my way through Weymouth's terraced backstreets, behind the seafront’s Victorian facades and through a maze of sleazy guesthouses, student bedsits and corner shops, where I'd make my turns. The last leg of the journey was uphill, at the end of a long steady incline at the edge of town. I headed straight out, Tommy would remain at the flat under the condition that I returned with a packet of pickled onion Monster Munch and a scotch egg.

I arrived at the dentist office late, but I still had to wait. The pain that I had tried so hard to stifle with drugs, made one last forceful return. It was as if my body, knowing that relief was imminent, dropped all its defenses and gave way to a full and glittering spectrum of a pain, so exquisite, that I disappeared inside of it completely until the receptionist called out my name. 

I sat in the dentist’s chair with a mouthful of the dentist's fingers. As a cold thread of Novacane went in I shivered and stared up at the ceiling beyond the cross-fading lens-flare created by the dentist's head as it eclipsed in and out of the light. As the drill whizzed into action, I tried to astrally project into a large colour poster-sized photograph which had been thoughtfully pinned up there, on the ceiling, presumably by the dentist, for the distraction of his patients (and to my own unexpected delight). It was an aerial view photograph of Weymouth and by the quality of its colour it must have been from the late 70’s, or early 80's. "Transcen-dental", I mumbled to myself, as the dentist ground a latex knuckle into my numb lower lip. 

As the dentist drilled I drooled. I studied the aerial photograph closely, trying to orientate myself within it until I found myself hovering like a seagull looking down on everything and I was there, suddenly, part of it. From this strange new bird's eye view, my seaside home looked wholly unfamiliar to me as I began to scan the coastline looking for local landmarks. Was that the clock tower? The Pavillion? The 24 hour garage where I was to buy Tommy’s munchies on my way home? I was sure they were, but not completely sure, I was a stoned seagull getting a root canal, after all. 

This radical shift in the perspective of the familiar required of me to reach for my own personal experiences of Weymouth as my map and guidebook. Once I “found myself” within it, I could use these experiences as markers to navigate wherever I needed to go. Whenever I recognized a location, I found the memories that I associated with it seemed to already be there waiting for me to re-experience them, before pointing me in the direction of the next. This drifting psycho-geography was as real for me as the bricks and mortar of the places themselves. 

It was in this way (and after I had climbed to a great height) that I began to then navigate my way back across town until I reached the street with the dentist's office on it. I counted the houses in until I found the surgery and I hung in the air outside, trying to get a glimpse of myself through one of the windows. And it was there that I could indeed see my own distinctive gecko green Gazelle classics and chocolate corduroy's as I lay back horizontally in the chair. The rest of me was obscured by the dentist who was hunched over, with both elbows sticking out and from the back he looked like he might be eating spaghetti off my face. 

Stabilizing my position against a sudden updraft, I tried to see if the Simon on the inside was aware of the Simon on the outside, so I landed on the window-ledge and looked within. In the very moment I did so, the dentist shifted his position and my attention was suddenly diverted from the photograph on the ceiling to the gnarly seagull sitting on the window-ledge outside looking right at me. And, before the oral suction tube snagged my tongue, I could have sworn there was a moment of mutual recognition between us.

The dentist told me to take a pink rinse and spit and reminded me I would be numb for a couple of hours and I should refrain from "smoking anything at all" in the meantime. “No problem” I said, sitting up and swinging my feet off the chair and finding myself in a sudden standing position. “I really like your photograph, by the way”, I told him, nodding to the ceiling. “Oh thank you!” replied the dentist, “I took it myself when I was a student in Naples. My friend had just got his pilot's license and took me up for a spin. Are you familiar with Naples, Mr Kossoff?” The dentist asked. "No", I replied, but I was unsure now if this was in-fact the correct answer..

Me, 1998, Brighton, UK. Original photo by Marcus Haydock

These thoughts as a framework..

Resident Alien. Part 13.

Harvey Benge. Part 2. On editing and sequencing. 

 

The reason for writing about Harvey Benge in the last post was originally to share his advice to anyone who might be in the process of making a photo-book. During his life, Harvey made over 70 books and zines and it was his preferred medium for presenting his photos, of which 'Vital Signs', published in 2000 and 'Truth and Various Deceptions' published in 2011 are amongst my favorites (from what I have seen). 

I re-discovered this photo-book advice again just recently and I still think It’s good advice and worth sharing. It appeared on his blog on Sunday, March 11th 2012 - A blog which remains today a rich and creative archive full of insights, ideas and personal process from this once busy working artist. It was these thoughts about editing and sequencing that I used to organize my own work into a series of connected episodes for publications, features and shows at that time. I also used these thoughts as a framework for my own photo-book, Remains To Be Seen, which was self published about a year later, in 2013.

1. Have a strong compelling idea. Fresh, exciting, demanding. Not derivative or seen it all before.

2. Come up with a riveting, compelling title for the book. And do an amazon check and make sure somebody else hasn't got there first.

3. Start with really good photographs, many more than you will finally need. 

4. Including  bad pictures will only drag down the good ones. 

5. Don't shoehorn in a crap picture just because it fits the idea. Nor include a great picture that doesn't fit the idea.

6. Make a sequence that surprises, challenges and puzzles. Ask more questions than give answers.

7. When you put pictures together don't make the reason blindingly obvious and make sure the sum of the parts is not less than the impact of the individual photographs.

8. Try and sequence the book based on a conceptual flow not purely visually.  A  sequence made visually is generally too obvious not to mention dull and boring.

9. Don't have more pictures than necessary. A book of around 50 or so pictures will work best. Less is often more.

10. Give the pictures room to breathe with plenty of white space. 

11. Consider the rhythm and flow of the work. Sequencing photographs is like composing music.

12. Think about what makes a great artwork and make sure what's been done measures up to that. Does the work have  a sense of mystery, a veiled narrative and a reason for the reader to want to come back (and back) to consider the work?

13. Don't over-design  the bookwork. The book is for the photographs not as a showcase for clever design. In fact, avoid "clever" completely.

14. Make sure the work has a feeling of authenticity about it. Avoid the contrived. 

15. Make the edit and the sequence and then do it again, and again, because it can always be done better. Always.

16. When you have something you really think works, make a book dummy which is as close as possible to the final book. This will give you a sense of the outcome of the work on both a visual and tactile level.

17. Finally, remember there are no rules. And even if you think there are, set out to break them. 

He also added “In the past I've made bookworks by printing postcard size prints of the potential images and spreading them out on a large table to edit and sequence. Although with this book I did make postcard prints I also went directly to making an indesign document and then converting the work to PDF files as I went. I've ended up with umpteen PDFs that chart the progress of the work, gradually refining and hopefully making the book better. I find this method really flexible and simple and using indesign is a breeze.”

All photographs in this post by Harvey Benge.