Suburban Dreams 65 Photographs
“Photography has spiritual links with the end of the world.”
- Wim Wenders (film maker).
The title of my slideshow in 65 photographs is “Suburban Dreams”. When Freud wrote his seminal work on dreams he used the German word for dream – traum. I needn’t tell you what this means for English speakers. The difference between a dream and a nightmare is more a matter of who is experiencing it. A rich man’s dream may well be the result of a poor man’s nightmare.
At the heart of everything human is a fundamental trauma. Becker described this with his theory that the ego is always seeking to find ways to express the “denial of death”. So we build our personal Towers of Babel. And we know what happened in that story.
We can get the gist of what Wim Wenders meant with his aphorism that photography has spiritual links with the end of the world. At one level photography exists to capture moments in time that are always passing away. The photographs I show you here present suburbs in a state of perpetual decay. All things must pass, George Harrison sang. No doubt about it. So this view sees the Photographer as Mortician. There’s a lot of that in William Eggleston’s work. Indeed Eggleston’s most famous photograph of the blood red room turned out to be prophetic. There was indeed a murder committed in that space a few years later (cue Twilight Zone music).
But like everything this is only half the story. The father of Process Philosophy, A.N. Whitehead, also believed that time consisted of moments that are inexorably passing away. BUT most importantly, these moments pass away ONLY so that they can give birth to new ones. The essence of existence is not death, but in fact revealed in the Will to Life.
This point is picked up on by that perceptive photographer/ philosopher Luigi Ghirri. As far as he was concerned the real role of photography is to take up from where the Mortician Photographer leaves us and re-create new possibilities (the Greek word for this is ανάσταση – resurrection). We certainly need documentary photographers who show us a suffering world that is passing away, but ONLY if we can see the “apparition” (Ghirri’s word apparizione in Italian) that lies within that moment: “Taking photographs is above all restoring a sense of wonder…And so we look first into the world itself, and then at the plate, and then into the final image, to discover the wonder of the gesture that had been achieved, to consider nothing insignificant, and to see in landscape, in a point in space, in a moment of life, or in a slight change of light, the possibility of a new perception.” *
I hope you will see that my choice of Coldplay’s profound song “Coloratura” from the album Music of the Spheres captures something of the spirit of this place I show in my photographs. Photograph 01 of the crescent moon in the clouds begins here:
“Coloratura, we fell in through the clouds, and everyone before us is there, welcoming us now. It’s the end of death and doubt, and loneliness is out.”
Our suburban dreams may well be founded on the desire to push aside our doubts and fears in “this crazy world” driven by consumerism and ego, and find neighbourly companionship though fleeting. But our dreams also mask a trauma in society that will either drive us apart from each other, or brings us together in love. I hope we choose the latter.
That is certainly the image I want to leave you with in Photograph 65 (“All the satellites imbue. In this crazy world I do, I just want you.”).
“In the end it’s all about the love you’re sending out.”
* Luigi Ghirri, The Complete Essays 1973-1991 (MACK, 2021) p 186.
Suburban Dreams 65 Photographs
“Photography has spiritual links with the end of the world.”
- Wim Wenders (film maker).
The title of my slideshow in 65 photographs is “Suburban Dreams”. When Freud wrote his seminal work on dreams he used the German word for dream – traum. I needn’t tell you what this means for English speakers. The difference between a dream and a nightmare is more a matter of who is experiencing it. A rich man’s dream may well be the result of a poor man’s nightmare.
At the heart of everything human is a fundamental trauma. Becker described this with his theory that the ego is always seeking to find ways to express the “denial of death”. So we build our personal Towers of Babel. And we know what happened in that story.
We can get the gist of what Wim Wenders meant with his aphorism that photography has spiritual links with the end of the world. At one level photography exists to capture moments in time that are always passing away. The photographs I show you here present suburbs in a state of perpetual decay. All things must pass, George Harrison sang. No doubt about it. So this view sees the Photographer as Mortician. There’s a lot of that in William Eggleston’s work. Indeed Eggleston’s most famous photograph of the blood red room turned out to be prophetic. There was indeed a murder committed in that space a few years later (cue Twilight Zone music).
But like everything this is only half the story. The father of Process Philosophy, A.N. Whitehead, also believed that time consisted of moments that are inexorably passing away. BUT most importantly, these moments pass away ONLY so that they can give birth to new ones. The essence of existence is not death, but in fact revealed in the Will to Life.
This point is picked up on by that perceptive photographer/ philosopher Luigi Ghirri. As far as he was concerned the real role of photography is to take up from where the Mortician Photographer leaves us and re-create new possibilities (the Greek word for this is ανάσταση – resurrection). We certainly need documentary photographers who show us a suffering world that is passing away, but ONLY if we can see the “apparition” (Ghirri’s word apparizione in Italian) that lies within that moment: “Taking photographs is above all restoring a sense of wonder…And so we look first into the world itself, and then at the plate, and then into the final image, to discover the wonder of the gesture that had been achieved, to consider nothing insignificant, and to see in landscape, in a point in space, in a moment of life, or in a slight change of light, the possibility of a new perception.” *
I hope you will see that my choice of Coldplay’s profound song “Coloratura” from the album Music of the Spheres captures something of the spirit of this place I show in my photographs. Photograph 01 of the crescent moon in the clouds begins here:
“Coloratura, we fell in through the clouds, and everyone before us is there, welcoming us now. It’s the end of death and doubt, and loneliness is out.”
Our suburban dreams may well be founded on the desire to push aside our doubts and fears in “this crazy world” driven by consumerism and ego, and find neighbourly companionship though fleeting. But our dreams also mask a trauma in society that will either drive us apart from each other, or brings us together in love. I hope we choose the latter.
That is certainly the image I want to leave you with in Photograph 65 (“All the satellites imbue. In this crazy world I do, I just want you.”).
“In the end it’s all about the love you’re sending out.”
* Luigi Ghirri, The Complete Essays 1973-1991 (MACK, 2021) p 186.