Real Places As Imaginary Places and Imaginary Places as Real Places.

For my Masters degree exhibition in 1989 my series of photographs were accompanied by the words “Horizons: Real places as Imaginary Places and Imaginary Places as Real Places.” These ideas, and approach to making photographs continue to be the ground for my work.

In the eighties “reality” was always being doubted, always shifting, and always dissolving into thin air before our eyes. The word “Reality” was always used with air quotes around it, just to show our doubt.

The photographer Duane Michals said,

“People believe in the reality of photography, but not in the reality of paintings. This gives photographers an enormous advantage. Unfortunately, photographers also believe in the reality of photographs.”

In his “A Failed Attempt to Photograph reality” of 1976 Michal’s describes how “…to photograph reality is to photograph nothing at all.”

Trained as a painter, photography’s confusion / conflation of the real and the imaginary, made photography for me a powerful and transformative means of expression, emotion, and critique.

In an essay for Susan Trangmar’s exhibition ‘Amidst’ in 1994, Yve Lomax introduced me to Michel Serres’ the Logic of Sacks 1991. Lomax describes how;

“My childhood took place in many different spaces, different play, different goings-on. Yet both these spaces were mixed with childhood pretence. They were both real and imaginary, both actual and virtual…But we children were not dualists.”

For Michel Serres these two realms are inseparable, one place is no truer than the other, one space does not come first and the other second.

“I will have to speak about the strange logics of sacks and the hard logic of boxes. A canvas sack folds easily into a canvas sack, and it can conversely contain it as well, whereas if a wooden crate contains a wooden crate, the latter cannot conversely contain the former.”

Traditional hard logic assumes space is not deformable, and that one space will always be a priori to the other, and there will always be a place of certainty. Serres’ theory of sacks describes soft spaces that can be folded and enfolded into one another. Spaces are liquid, fluid, dynamic, and becoming, ever changing and not fixed.

For me, the camera is a paradox machine, and the photograph is a paradox. The light passing through the camera enfolds the indexical touch of light with the imaginary perspective of the photographer. The photograph is both real and unreal at the same time.

Colin Wilson