)but he isn’t inside it,
and there is no outside)1
Previously, I had photographed almost exclusively outdoors; the camera was to me an instrument of the en plein air, it seemed to suffocate indoors, and I felt the need to take it outside whenever the light was right. This eventually became quite vacuous and my photographs luminous but mute.
This project began as I moved off campus; born of a premature nostalgia for academic spaces (and the bodies therein) which I will now have to depart from. Being in the habit of rambling2 after dinner, which in the wintery months had to be taken indoors,
I began to notice.
An early site of interest was the dust in these rooms: “You’ll be surprised to see what can collect in a mattress over the months,
over the years. Every day, every night of our lives, we’re leaving little bits of ourselves, flakes of this and that, behind.”3 Their stirring figures,4 made visible by neglected lights forgotten, were then to me of an almost amorous interest.
My father was an academic. I grew up in university halls, classrooms and offices; the dusty smell of stale coffee and printed paper puts me at ease. There was an attempt, essential to this project, to merge the literary and the photographic; I had wanted to see if there was yet another way for untimely documentation to transcend the documentary, for it to have a degree of tangential freedom—outside of time, altogether outside of life—as I had felt in writing. To turn images into a type of unintelligible lang- uage of the not unintelligible, of something I had surely felt and had wished to retain. These rooms exist in a labyrinthine realm of false symbols: the exit sign never leads to an exit, the window never allows the eye to take leave, and the hallway seems always to turn into itself—There seemed to be no risk, in these photographs, of losing sight of things.5
(The danger in photographing open spaces, the ever expanding, fugitive horizon. I had wanted to capture the wandering eye,
to contain its reflections and deflections within an enclosed space. This part of the project had been a failure; the essence of
the medium seems to “dissolve into nothing” when I follow it through.6)
Settled in a corner, the surrounding wall a megaphone, the site comes in focus; leaving the only invisible part, the corner itself, behind me, occupied by my shadow; with my back rubbing against its skin. The extension of the camera bellows like a vacuum cleaner, sucks in the dust of forgotten selves now scattered together, decades of coming and going condensed into that fulfilling smell of emptiness. I want to touch and collect these residuals. An ultimate act of voyeurism of defiant objects, whose desired being is absent. A maze into which I am voluntarily lost, desiring to see and to penetrate realities slow and indescribably detailed.8
The main thing is the dust, matter out of place, not the body; It is photography, not the photographed which has me entranced
...The trigger kills with two clicks, döden,9 the dark slide like the blade of a guillotine; slicing away something essential, vision of that which was not meant to be seen, afterhours, after time…"less of a noise than anything else that moves, like the hand of a clock, like the shadow of the hand of a clock, like time itself."10
Dust gathers at night, little pieces of ourselves. Dead skin, fallen hair, drift then congregate into layers of copulating emptiness.
The sleeping bodies of these rooms, clocks ticking away with no one there to watch, so that time passing becomes spatial, measured in thicknesses of collected dust—decay at a satisfying and comfortingly slow rate, the walls peel, the posters droop.
Breathing in the dust unsettled by my intrusion, becoming adrift once more before landing again; becoming part of this entity,
it embodies me like the camera obscura that devours its user; I dare not use a dark cloth, afraid the view of the rooms will
consume me once more from within like a Phagocyte. These unending rooms, ever multiplying and unfolding like the laying
flat of the intestines of some great monster.
To entrap the camera's gaze, visual aporia of excess.
What did he say? 5 pairs of shoes outside a door labeled 1. Downstairs, a doorknob turned and I barely managed to hold on; through a slit darker than where I had stood, I see a living room. A voice addressed me without speaking, I apologized for intruding and did not manage to take a photograph. But what exactly did he say? If only one can forget what is already forgotten.
Within the cradle of institutions, systems of confinement—I found comfort in these late evening walks. Entering buildings at night, being inside this “leviathan” slowly dying (for me), an intimate elegy for academia with “the onanism of a funeral poem.”11 We
are exhausted to the end having done precisely nothing. We own nothing and owe everything. We expend to excess with every click of the shutter, pure indulgence. There lies a monstrous politics of economy which we shy away from when presenting our work
as works of art, as if we had plucked boxes of film from a tree in our backyard.
Prints on a wall appear so free of evil, yet it is the final product, the end result of an extended line of industrial production: we are consumers who have mistaken themselves for laborers, and we consume artworks with as clear a conscious as we buy ground
beef from a supermarket. Our reverie of the individual has at last morphed into a perverse polymeric hive: “these are our Valleys of Canaan where, in place of milk and honey, streams of neon flow down over ketchup and plastic.”12 Walls shrinking in, no more
collective spaces of enclosure; with a bit of luck, we shall rent our own walls, faced with monitors and decked with opioids, a perpetual algorithmic habit for the liberated individual. “This, then, is where people come to live.”13
We are free at last.
1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations.
2. nonverbally
3. Carver, Raymond. Collectors.
4. “a dust of figures stirring according to an unpredictable order”. Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse.
5. “the sea, going out so far you lose sight of it”. Calle, Sophie. Blind.
6. Wittgenstein. op. cit.
7. Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way.
8. Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil.
12. Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society.
13. Rilke. op. cit.