Introduction: Somewhere First Encountered as Fiction (2020 - 2025)
A daily plethora of photographs of the everyday in the media and on the internet is an accepted facet of reality. I use photography of the everyday, photographs mostly taken by amateurs found on eBay and photo editing software to transpire fictional and nonfictional worlds. I often use literary fiction as a guide to take photographs, but the taxonomy of photographs according to what books I have read, including non fiction, is a continued endeavour. This series is primarily focused on the 'everyday', somewhere often assumed and even asserted as the locus for truth. It presently comprises 15 sets of photographs.
One Point Zero
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick is set in the future after World War Terminus. Most of the population has emigrated to Mars leaving a desolate Earth and mainly the ‘specials’ behind. The specials also referred to as the ‘chickenheads’ have low intelligence and are considered inferior to the rest of the population. The book follows the existential struggles and moral dilemmas of Rick Deckard tasked with hunting down 6 runaway androids who have escaped a life of servitude on Mars. The androids look indistinguishable from humans. Deckard uses the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test to gauge who is human and who is android.
In this series of photographs, by mapping the somewhere depicted in Dick’s novel onto the remnants of a post war modernism, which is increasingly rare in the UK, I can glimpse the city of Birmingham from how I remember it as a young child.
From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, up until the age of 4, I lived in Newtown, an inner-city region of Birmingham. Newtown was part of a sweeping post war redevelopment scheme with utopian goals. Everything in Newtown, except for the old abandoned factories, was new, modern and mostly made of concrete, including the playgrounds. The city centre of Birmingham was similar. Birmingham looked to modernism, egalitarian aesthetics in architecture and concrete to recover from World War Two devastation, more so than any other city in the UK. The city was promoted as ‘The Forward City’ to the rest of the world. Most of Newtown and the centre of Birmingham as it was during the late 1970s and early 1980s has been demolished. At some point during the early 1980s was when my father moved to America never to return permanently to the United Kingdom again.
Written in 1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? alludes to Discourse on Method by the 17th century philosopher René Descartes. The Latin dictum ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ (usually translated as, ‘I think, therefore I am’) derives from this short book. Part Five discusses animals, machines and automata as synonymous, all incapable of thinking rationally or feeling pain. Descartes is often cited as the founder of modern philosophy and science.
This series (ongoing) includes photographs taken in the UK, Germany and Switzerland.
Two Point Zero
The Snow Moon appeared in the United Kingdom this year [2023] on 5th February. This was the second full moon of the year. It followed the Wolf Moon which appeared in January. If you saw either of these full moons, at any one moment, while you were gazing into the night sky, the moon you saw might have already disappeared or changed. The American philosopher William Ralph Schroeder has explained, ‘there is a temporary gap that separates the emanation of light from the moon and anyone’s perception of that light on earth’. For Schroeder the lacuna between the moon and how it appears from earth is a suitable analogy for the distance between an object and the perception of it. Complete presence with whatever is being perceived is always an impossibility.
In Beauty and Sadness (1964) by the Nobel Prize winning Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata, Oki Toshio has written a book about his extra marital relationship with the schoolgirl Otoko Ueno which is a critical and commercial success. Although, objectifying her in his writing is akin to trapping the light as it appears on earth of what Shakespeare’s Theseus in a Midsummer Night’s Dream calls ‘the cold, fruitless moon’. Anyone who reads Toshio's book sees only a 16-year-old girl who was mistreated by a much older married man. This is a devastatingly sad story about love, heartbreak, revenge and loss but also about how writing can shape the perception of someone in the minds of others as immutable.
This series comprises amateur colour slide photographs found on eBay which have been edited using image manipulation software.
Beauty and Sadness playlist: https://on.soundcloud.com/khf37
Three Point Zero
In Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country/雪国 (1982), Komako works as a geisha in a hot-spring village in a mountainous region of Japan. The village is portrayed during the winter to spring months with a deep layer of snow. What happens in the novel often happens at night. An icy and snowy region under a starry sky is chiaroscuro rendered through words. Komako looks up at the sky to comment on how ‘beautiful’ the Milky Way is, Kawabata explains, ‘Was this the bright vastness the poet Bashō saw when he wrote of the Milky Way over a stormy sea? […] Each individual star stood out from the rest, and even particles of silver dust in the luminous clouds could be picked out, so clear was the night.’
Komako can identity other geishas from how they play the samisen, a musical instrument with only three strings. She socialises, drinks whiskey, gets drunk, falls in love but never ventures beyond the remit of her duties as a geisha. Love isn’t an overwhelming force here, but contained and tolerant, enveloped by melancholy.
Four Point Zero
Blumfeld by Franz Kafka
Five Point Zero
In Alice Walker’s epistolary The Color Purple (1982) the protagonist Celie is a young African American woman who is poorly educated, submerged in poverty and abused. Set in Georgia at the start of the 1900s, Celie is surrounded by systemic and historical oppression. She writes to God often as though there is no one else present who could understand. Her letters to God are a defence against invisibility, they are a resistance against only being considered good enough to be the child carer in a loveless relationship.
My mother is from Jamaica and when I was 12, I spent 6 weeks there. I met members of my Black extended family for the first time, I made friends, I went to church a lot, I stayed in more than one single-storey house with a porch and travelled across the country. So much of what Walker delineates in her Pulitzer winning novel can be seen also in this tiny Caribbean island, from the privileging of light skin to the racial segregation to resolute inventiveness despite the poverty. It can be seen in the UK too even though the time and formation of the African diaspora are different.
Celie learns about the racist agenda of British and American imperialism to disparage African culture and ways of living from the letters she receives from her sister Nettie. They are letters which had been kept hidden from Celie by her abusive husband. Nettie writes from somewhere in Africa, from a location which is never fully identified in the novel.
For this series of photographs, I have been collecting photographs of or are connected to Nigeria. This is the country where my white English/Irish father was born, where he spent numerous summer holidays away from boarding school and where my grandparents lived for many years. The intention is to imagine it as the somewhere in Africa which Nettie writes about but at the same time has a personal connection to me. Searching for and collecting documentary photographs of Nigeria has led me to a new understanding of the country’s history, people and culture.
Additionally, in this series I have used both AI generative software and photo editing software to produce a collection of portraits.
Thirteen Point Zero
Jaqueline Rose’s The Plague (2023) is an erudite, nuanced and eloquent rebuke of the inequalities that appeared in clear focus during the Covid-19 crisis and the apathy of those in power towards everyday people in the richest countries of the world where the death toll and infection rates were amongst the highest. Unequivocally, some figures in the position of power did their best to orchestrate ‘collective psychosis’. Rose explains this pathological mindset brilliantly, ‘the psychotic withdraws from reality and moulds their sense of the outside to harmonise with their delusions.’ The consequence of those delusions was a surge in domestic violence against women trapped indoors with abusive partners, an increase in the threat of racist attacks and many lives were lost owing to their exclusion from extreme wealth. Drawing on the philosophy of Simone Weil, Rose asserts how ‘thought’ is always in opposition to domination.
Rose’s The Plague opens with a chapter on Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947), a book written during a time when Europe was traumatised by wars. Rose first studied Camus’s The Plague for an A Level in French. Camus was resolute, Rose explains, there is no justification for the suffering caused by ‘the plague’ or the hidden inequalities between rich and poor it transpires. Further, the book puts forward how the plague should be an opportunity to craft a better world. Something that will never happen ‘if human subjects do not question the cruelty and injustice of their social arrangements.’
