Ghosts (2024 -2025)

 

Introduction

 

‘Everything that we can imagine is real’ (Pablo Picasso)

 

 

I like to believe that ghosts exist but I know that, when they do, they exist in my mind, emerging to haunt the present. Never coalescing into shape or form, they nevertheless insinuate themselves into my present reality, changing my perception of what is ‘there’ - changing the meaning of what I see.

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Modern neuropsychological thinking, particularly in the study of consciousness, would seem to assert that our perception of reality is a mental construction, a simulacrum of what is ‘out there’ – all of our reality is, in short, ‘imagined’.

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I made these images as visual metaphors for the experience of derealization, a phenomenon whereby our visual perception of ‘reality’ may change leading to confusion between what is real and imagined. Such moments can occur when we lose our present, grounded, sense of self. For most of us this is momentary, but for some – those who have experienced significant personal trauma, for example – it can last for minutes, hours, even days.

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I chose to photograph subjects where what is normally familiar and benign and unremarkable may be differently imagined. I was interested in how we begin to imagine/create the world differently - to experience a changed subjective space - when personal memory, collective memory, our imagined narratives, or our past experiences of trauma act to change what we perceive and what it may mean.

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In making these images I am drawn to the transitional spaces between light and dark, known and unknown, familiar and strange, potential safety and potential threat. In many of the images, forms merge and blur, focus may shift from the normal, texture may be present where it shouldn’t be in reality. Foreground and background are somewhat confused and ephemerality is often present. These visual messages are unsettling to our normal means of quickly making sense of the visual. Yet the shapes and forms of the world remain identifiable, durable. In keeping with Freud’s unheimliche (the uncanny), the familiar is made strange. The real world and an imagined world coexist.

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Photographs in themselves occupy a space between reality and imagination. The indexical nature of the photograph (if it was photographed, it was there) has, despite the increased suspicion of manipulation that has grown with developments in digital processing and artificial intelligence, imbued the photograph with an aura of truth when it comes to representing reality. Every photograph however is the result of a multitude of selections by the photographer (what is included/excluded in framing, the point of view, exposure choices, focussing choices, processing and printing choices) to construct a reality that is intended for communication to the viewer. Photographs are both windows to the reality that existed, and mirrors of the reality imagined by the photographer.

 

The images are sequenced into three sections in the work. The first two sections (Ghosts of Memory and Ghosts of Place) explore the ways in which we can voluntarily welcome a transformation in reality through utilizing our imagination. The third section (Ghosts of Trauma) explores the more involuntary and less comfortable transformations that can be imagined if we were to experience the unpredictable triggers for feelings of fear and perceived threat that are related to trauma, and the depersonalization which can result. Accordingly, these images are darker, more dissonant, and, like the fractured psyche of the traumatized individual, the sequencing has less fluidity and less coherence.

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Go to Ghosts of memory

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Go to Ghosts of place

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Go to Ghosts of trauma