Buried under a decade..

Resident Alien. Part 1.

For about a month I have been keeping a journal for a project I have started working on. It is sort of a process log and keeping this log it has since become part of that process. By writing about this project I have had the chance to consider it more carefully than I might have otherwise done and the process has been insightful. These insights are now helping to determine the shape of the project. I have already made several entries into this log, but in order to begin sharing it I have to first introduce it, give it some background and context. Please consider this, and whatever I am going to say next, as that introduction.

In 2012 I had an idea for a photobook, but life got in the way and the idea got pushed to one side and then buried under a decade. It was a collection of photos I'd made during the first 4 years I’d spent in the USA, beginning in 2008 and ending in 2012 with a change of camera. In all this time, as my life unfolded in ways I could never have predicted, my thoughts would sometimes return to this work and I promised myself when I finally arrived in a space to give it the focused attention it needed that I would try and honor it. How I was going to honor it exactly I did not yet know, but I was always having these drifting nebulous ideas for it and over time a few of these ideas began to gravitate to one another until, just recently, a sort of conception happened and I suddenly, in a flash, saw the whole completed thing floating in my head. 

In the decade of separation from this work I did not have access to it at all, but my memory of it was always strong and alive in my imagination and I found, through some kind of bedraggled remote viewing, I could work on it and it became an important part of my creative inner life and general sense of grounding. At other times when I’d think about this work I would wonder if it was even relevant anymore as so much time had passed since its making. It was in those moments that I’d realize, that was just me thinking in terms of it having an audience instead of what it really was, an object of my own heart's desire that I wanted to bring into being for myself. Why? because death is always coming and all the witnesses to the making of the photographs are now part of a parallel universe that I can no longer reach, unless..

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..

Truth based fictions. Part 3.

At the end of our street, beyond the washing lines..

The 3rd poster on my childhood bedroom wall in 1976 was of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda from the movie Easy Rider. They were riding their Choppers, side-by-side through what looked like the same New Mexico landscape where I was standing that day in Taos in 2018. The poster was shot from a following car and it looked out at them across polished chrome like the cultural icons they already were. This poster was pinned up on my wall above the ‘Cocktail Party’ poster and the best view of it was when I was sitting on the floor. Easy Rider was a relatively new movie then, released 7 years earlier in 1969, the year I was born. In their boots, shades, hats, and with wild hair blowing back, my kid self had no idea who these motorcycle cowboys were and my imagination roamed for a connection to them and, in our home at that time, it did not take me long to find one.

– 2nd paragraph retained by author – 

Looking back now, I can say with certainty that I was, in fact, raised by the characters of Easy Rider but the cast was British. There was no high, bright desert sun over vast cactus-covered landscapes in my story. Instead my childhood was a dark, gritty, and in some ways a supernatural tale, set against the backdrop of social housing in a Garrison town. Our small civilian rock-n-roll hilltop pocket was where Easy Rider's counterculture could still be found alive and well but it ended abruptly at the entrance to the tree plantation at the end of our street, beyond the washing lines, where all the land from there on out was owned by the Ministry of Defense. Tanks, helicopters and squaddies in fatigues were the everyday and commonplace in Tidworth, Hampshire in 1976. As were the puddles of blood outside the pubs in the morning from fights the soldiers had amongst themselves the night before. The motorcycles of my boyhood were Triumphs, Norton’s, and BSA’s and I never saw a Chopper anywhere else but in that poster. Our free festival was at Stonehenge and that year we watched the summer solstice sun rise between the stones. Where I remember a sea of people cocooned in brightly coloured sleeping bags scattered across a huge muddy field on the morning I got lost. An open tent with dub reggae playing from speakers mounted on stands outside. A plate of beans on toast eaten from the lap of oil stained jeans. A silver death's head ring. When Hawkwind took me in.

Dennis Hopper became the archetype of all the men that had a hand in raising me. It was his flickering image that slept on our couch for a year and smelled of Cocoa butter, engine oil and weed, with his book about Salvador Dali, he'd always let me read. It was him, in my memory, that took me to school in a motorcycle sidecar. It is his face that I remember playing Bob Dylan songs on a guitar from beginning to end at our kitchen table while howling like a dog. It was him that drove us to Wales in a Morris Minor van in search of magic mushrooms. It was him that introduced me to Marvel comics, the Mary Celeste and the curse of Tutankhamun. It was him that explained the closed loop timeline of the Planet of the Apes. And now I wonder, at this late hour, if the face that my imagination was actually roaming to connect with was really that of my father, who died in March that year, and who probably has more to do with all of this than I am willing to admit.