I’m interested in people’s connection with places and the meanings places come to have. Through preventing me from restlessly visiting commons around Southern England, as for many of us, the 2020 pandemic has enforced a more subjective, introspective attitude towards the same subject. There came a point of realisation in May, when I was stumbling through mud and brambles in a neglected corner of Colaton Raleigh Common. I realised at this moment that I wasn’t blindly exploring, open to everything and to happenstance, but actively looking for a specific type of experience. I realised, suddenly, that at 47 I was doing exactly the same thing I’d been doing throughout my life – since childhood, in fact. 

My more recent background is in writing fiction and filmmaking, and the kind of writing and filmmaking that’s always been most important to me is the weird and the eerie, as I’ve mentioned previously. There’s a psychological explanation for this, as I’ve also recently mentioned, linked to a very lonely and unhappy childhood and a no less easy adult life full of a repeating cycle of hope and disappointment which has led to a lifelong battle with dysthymia. My attraction to weird and eerie places is that such places more accurately reflect my inner states and, through my then being able to externalise them, I can find solace and approach them creatively, rather than trying to suppress or battle them. 

It would, however, be foolish to reduce this interest entirely to my unhappiness. Such books and films are enormously popular and not everyone who loves them suffers depressive moods; in fact, many of their creators are full of joy and vitality, living lives full of event and people. And so in creating a zine from images of these places, I needed to decide whether to make the work introspective or more outward looking. As I don’t think my life, personal history or my character are of much interest, or at least as I’m insufficiently interested in them to make them the focus of my work, I decided it would be better to use the images as a started point to look beyond the circumstances that brought them about. 

My daughter is, like me, someone driven by their imagination. She’s also drawn to the weird and the eerie – has, in fact, elected to read Mark Fisher’s The Weird and The Eerie over the summer. Though she’s had her ups and downs, they’ve not been more than one would expect for a sensitive child at a difficult time. Ruby is, like me, drawn to unsettling places, which she then fashions into artwork, teasing out stories, characters and moods. 

I have likewise, over the years, had similar responses to places and these have appeared from time to time in my work. Initially, I’d thought to create a fictional narrative from the twilight images shot in May and June of this year, drawing on horror, dystopian sci-fi, disaster movies, and folk fantasy. I quickly felt uncomfortable in doing so; this was too contrived a response to the actual places, too abstracted from the lived experience of being there, smelling the damp, noticing the commons enclosures. It felt too removed from my more general interests in place and in commons in particular. It felt like a betrayal of my attention to and concern for context.

Instead, I wanted to communicate not what I was thinking, nor even really what I was feeling, being in the diminishing light in these strange places, but to somehow provide an experience for the viewer, such that a viewer might have their own experience of the place. This is something I’ve encountered in photobooks: I’m yet again going to mention John Gossage’s The Pond, but also W.P. Eckersley’s Dark City. It’s more common, however, for a photographer to curate the experience of place in some way, and there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with doing so: Joel Sternfeld’s Rome After Rome, for example. But with this particular engagement I’ve had with place, what I’ve found most interesting, and what I’ve particularly wanted to communicate is the uncertainty, the liminality, and the imaginative potential of the commons’ hidden corners. By either interrogating the autobiographical and psychological impulses which have drawn me to them, or imaginatively developing the images in the form of a narrative or world-building logic, I would be closing down that potential for the viewer and thus be unable to communicate it. 

Instead, while there has been imaginative engagement in the WIP – the idea of unwittingly entering a parallel world draws on works like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or more recently numerous episodes of Black Mirror – the engagement is left unfinished, inviting completion by the viewer through asking questions rather than making statements. This inclusive engagement was something I began exploring in my Ruscha task at the start of this module, and was why the zine didn’t have a title or an explanation. Likewise, my Hidden Corners exhibition asks questions of its viewers, inviting them to seek out their own engagements with the places in which the images are found. 

This is all a very, very different approach to the one I’d been taking up until this module. To some extent, it draws on previous film work, but is far more deliberately obscured in terms of meaning. Whether or not it’s an approach which will have a life beyond this module is difficult to say. However, in terms of exploring and communicating my own attachment to place, it’s been a novel, crucial and necessary step: how else could I possibly begin to examine and represent the attachments of others to place if I hadn’t put in considerable work to doing so?