“i danced along a colored wind / dangled from a rope of sand” tom waits
i don’t usually place my photographs in time, holding to the vanity that they are timeless, but these words and images have come from a time that is unlike any other, that most of us have no living memory of anything similar. the pandemic blew in, and blew out so many conventional wisdoms. the economy collapsed, the ecology thrived, the streets drew quiet, the people made noise.
people got sick, people died. for some it was real, for others it was all a great hoax. after all it was unseen. while the virus was unseeable its effects were not.
our neoliberal economic model has been shown wanting. it has exposed the lie that the owners of production like to peddle, that they are the ones that produce the wealth. well without your workers where is the wealth? and anyway, who do you produce the wealth for? it is certainly not the likes of me. i, like most, work to gain the means to survive in the society we have allowed to develop, but we gain little and lose most. we are killing the world we need to ultimately survive, slowly we thought, but it appears now not, as the climate change accelerates. the screens put in front of us to shape how we perceive the world around us are starting to dissolve
but anyway, as we dance along the colored wind, living quietly in my wide open locked down location i was wondering how to capture this time in photography. well in the end there was an obvious route to take.
i have meddled with infrared photography on and off, but it has been by using ir filters on my standard camera. this has the limitations of time. long exposures are required to allow the inbuilt ir filters to be overcome, so the results are often blurred by the noise of time, the truth hidden.
so, in lockdown i acquired an ir converted camera, where the blocking filter has been removed and replaced by an alternative. walked out and took some images of the seen unseen, or indeed the unseen seen
the results look like the familiar but are not quite as we expect to see the world. something has changed, we have seen the unseen, we see an alternative, we recognise it but not as we expect, the rope of sand is just that, we realise we are hanging on to nothing. if we let go, the reality need not be bad, it could be beautiful, and hopeful, and uplifting. there is another possibility, and those that say otherwise just need their filters removed and reset