for some time now I have been working on a series of photographs that speak to power in the landscape. It’s a subject that has taken me down may thought paths. what is power? is it the destructive force of nature, or our ability to harnes that force to provide for our needs? it’s the ability the landowners have to control access to our wild places, or it could be the ability of a landscape to bring calm to a troubled mind?
i have found it at times an sisyphean labour, to settle on a coherent narrative, to settle my mind on the task in hand, indeed to find a collection of images that provide the way into seeing the story i’m trying to tell.
this collection is not that, but it is not unrelated.
the photographs here have emerged over the years and mostly without me having had a conscious idea of what they represent or how they relate. but now, at the time of writing, i like the rest of the country, and indeed much of the world, am confined to my home during what is an unprecedented challenge to our current way of life. so I have been looking through my catalogue of images. the photographs collected here seem to choose now to coalesce and show why they allowed themselves to be captured. It’s clear that the images do have a story to tell and that they were just waiting for me to hear them.
so, what did they coalesce around? what do they want to tell you? as a viewer you will find your own meaning in them i’m sure, but to me they talk of the futility of all undertakings. we all have dreams, we all have needs. people build the buildings and things they need to make those dreams happen. the dreams that may be as simple as having a dry place to sleep or a way of making the money to keep the dream alive, or indeed as grand as leaving a mark on the world so you remain remembered. however, in the end, as is the way, the dream dies, that solution returns to dust.
but don’t let this description of the entropy that drives our world be seen as a fatalistic or pessimistic view of what is present. as the introductory quote from ovid suggests, and bob dylan states, death is not the end. many of the things that were once dreams of some individual or of a community may decay, but something else will come along and reuse that space that is left behind. so really, all that can be said, and all that these captured moments are telling us, is that we are always living the dream.