WALKING WITH GHOSTS 2020

“A friend came to see me in a dream. From far away. And I asked in the dream: Did you come by photograph or train?”

John Berger (1975)

Walking with Ghosts

‘Walking with Ghosts’ is a series of short films and photographic images on the theme of ‘ghosts’, as proposed by Roland Barthe’s in Camera Lucida; Reflections on Photography. French cultural theorist Roland Barthes found consolation in a picture of his mother he had kept after her death, as a child. Taking the picture as his starting point, in writing his essay about photography, Barthes described the photograph as ‘the living image of a dead thing.’ This was something that it shared in common with painting, which had originated – as documented by ancient Egyptian funerary objects – in portraits of the dead. But what was unique to the photograph, according to Barthes, was its ‘punctum’, which he defined as the sensory, intensely subjective effect of a photograph on the viewer: ‘The punctum of a photograph is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).’

The Time Machine
Rotating rotary washing line used to project 35mm slides

Art critic and author John Berger observed in his 1975 book ‘The Seventh Man’: “A friend came to see me in a dream. From far away. And I asked in the dream: ‘Did you come by photograph or train?’ All photographs are forms of transport and an expression of absence.”

The concept was to create a number of short films and photographs from 35mm slides of family holidays and trips taken in the early 1970’s. The slides were projected onto a customised screen attached to a moving rotary washing line, dubbed ‘The Time Machine’. The slide show projections were then shot at night to capture the movement and rythem of the rotating screens with the ambient sound of the projector, creating a quality of contemplation and the passing of time.