PART I: Defining Spaces

‘I see life as a passageway, with no fixed beginning or destination. We tend to focus on the destination all the time and forget about the in-between spaces.’

—Do Ho Suh, Passage/s exhibition, Victoria Miro Gallery, London.

We experience life through a series of spaces: physical and metaphysical, architectonic and semantic. All four are deeply interdependent, forming the foundational pillars on which our existence as embodied, empiricist beings depends. But the last of these, language, is perhaps most vital of all.

Consider the Sámi, Europe’s only indigenous community, whose linguistic lineage stretches back some four thousand years. Their enclaves may be found on the Kola Peninsula in Russia, the northernmost tip of Finland, parts of Sweden as far south as Idre, and the adjacent area of Norway’s rocky coast, resulting in nine distinct language variants that are remarkable not only for their diversity but their beauty, their exactitude in…

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One morning, Don Miguel got out of bed
with one idea rooted in his head:
to graft his orange to his lemon tree.
It took him the whole day to work them free,
lay open their sides, and lash them tight.
For twelve months, from the shame or from the fright
they put forth nothing; but one day there appeared
two lights in the dark leaves. Over the years
the limbs would get themselves so tangled up
each bough looked like it gave a double crop,
and not one kid in the village didn’t know
the magic tree in Miguel’s patio.

The man who bought the house had had no dream
so who can say what dark malicious whim
led him to take his axe and split the bole
along its fused seam, and then dig two holes.
And no, they did not die from solitude;
nor did their branches bear a sterile fruit;
nor did their unhealed flanks weep every spring
for those four yards that lost them everything
as each strained on its shackled root to face
the other’s empty, intricate embrace.
They were trees, and trees don’t weep or ache or shout.
And trees…

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‘Street photography is like hunting; you need intuition, speed and a loaded gun.’

—Pablo Bartholomew, Indian Express.

PART ONE: INHUMAN TRAFFICKING

What is street photography if not public pornography, performed by players unaware of their roles, processed and packaged for private consumption?

Contorted into frame for our pleasure, their faces and bodies co-opted without consent, we gorge on the sight of strangers unsheathed, their inner selves reduced to naked tropes lacking depth or dimension, flattened and stretched, dilated and distorted, their context and continuity circumcised by an unseen hand, a predatory aperture.

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Is the therapist a sinner or a saint? The rhetorical demagogue David Smail and the humanist champion Arthur Burton think they know, but each has arrived at a different conclusion:

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Part One: Machineries of Slavery

'On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.’

Oscar Wilde,
The Soul of Man Under Socialism.

In 1889, the American science fiction author Edward Bellamy penned an article for Harper's Magazine entitled 'With the Eyes Shut'. In it, he envisioned a hypothetical media device he called an 'indispensable', designed to store and replay, in audio form, a selection of newspapers, magazines, and books. Today, almost everyone carries an indispensable in their pocket or purse—a smartphone, infinitely more effective and efficient at serving media, insidious in its ability to hijack the contents of consciousness. Permanently networked and chronically overstimulated, we routinely experience a paradoxical sense of detachment and anhedonia. As Roisin Kiberd puts it in The Disconnect, 'nothing is ever real enough to grant full satisfaction'. Starved of meaning despite the glut of content, obesely overfed …

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PART I: CELLULOID GODS

'I sometimes think the day will come when all modern nations will adore a sort of American god, a god who will have been someone who lived as a human being and about whom much will have been written in the popular press: images of this god will be set up in the churches, not as the imagination of any individual painter may fancy him, not floating on a Veronica cloth, but fixed once and for all by photography. Yes, I foresee a photographed god'.

—The Goncourt Journals, November 1861.

We idolise images, their creation and consumption. We worship human faces, many of them photographic, all of them composed, constructed, curated. Honest or ersatz, we have become adept at parsing and appraising their countless configurations. We are, as Robert A. Sobieszek notes in his forward to Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, ‘consistently and addictively bent on studying facial representations and trying to discern what lies behind them.’

…

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I follow the path of the gods through the wood
My eyes take every twisting turn of the grain
But my body moves straight along the planking
So those who watch me see that the path of the gods is straight
While I dwell in a world with no straightness in it.

—‘The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao’
from Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card.

INTRODUCTION

‘We, the godspoken, don’t have to wait and wonder about the mandate of heaven, as others do,’ declares Han Fei-tzu in Orson Scott Card’s science fiction masterwork, Xenocide. Denizen of a world in which OCD is a seen as a blessing, not a curse, a gift from the gods who speak through its obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours, Fei-tzu’s rapturous acceptance of his condition starkly contrasts with the horror articulated by an anonymous woman in our own world, relentlesssly tormented by thoughts of injuring her family.

‘I would work hard to reason with myself, assure myself, and pray to my Heavenly Father for forgiveness and healing,’ she write…

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PART I: Myth Mages

‘In order to put meaning back into our lives, we should recognise illusions for what they are, and we should reach out and touch the fabric of reality.'

—Evan Walker, The Physics of Consciousness.

Society has conditioned us to regard the camera as a Cartesian instrument. An objective witness of the real, an inviolate testament to the truth of a particular moment. Chemically conceived in an instant of elemental union, carried to term in the amniotic fluids of developer and fixer, delivered in a darkroom, its progeny apparate as mechanical records emancipated from human intervention, perfectly adhered to the originating referent. Produced, as André Bazin declares in The Ontology of the Photographic Image, ‘automatically, without the creative intervention of man.'

This conception miscarries: in actuality, the subjective, selective human agent is integral to the process. As John Tagg makes plain in The Burden of Representation, 'the camera is …

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Well, he wants you to hate and he wants you to fear,
Wants you to fear something that's not even there.
He'll give you your hate, and he'll give you his lies,
He'll give you the weapons to run out and die.
And you give him your soul.

—Talkin’ Devil, Bob Dylan.

PART I: Driven to Distraction

Love and depression share many characteristics; they are both, in their way, equally seductive. The seduction of love lies in the ecstasy of infatuation; the seduction of depression lurks in its distractions of despair. I say ‘distractions’, plural, because depression is a hermaphrodite that repurposes the agitated brain—already driven to distraction in the disordered sense of the word—as its reproductive organs. A parasite of unlimited libido, it spawns infinitely in the mind as impulses toward distraction of all kinds: sexual promiscuity (that shackles one in shame), self-medication (that numbs one in torpor), and thrill seeking behaviour (that inevitably imprisons on…

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PART I: Minor Indiscretions

‘He thought he knew the girl. Crouching over the lightbox, it was hard to tell. What was her body like? What kind of nipples did she have? What sort of breasts and thighs? How strangely light and bold the tuft of pubic hair. He has a predatory curiosity which directs his look but what he is offered remains pictures of a girl he thinks he knows.’

—John Tagg, The Burden of Representation.

Our children are captives, held hostage to our fabrications about their collective nature, their individual identities. We dictate who they are, who they must become, denying them their sovereignty, their agency. They so often exist solely to serve our fantasies of immortality, our hunger to reclaim our youth. And other, darker desires. They are, in many ways, the games we play as adults, their autonomy circumscribed by a will that is not their own, their boundless innocence soon sullied by our failure to protect them from ourselves. Perhaps this is why the photography of children is so deeply problematic. We refuse to represent them truthfully, too afraid to see reflected in their naïveté and knowing the worst of what we are.

‘Virginity is paradoxically erotic,’ writes Liliane James in her forward to The Age of Innocence, David Hamilton’s menagerie of mannered nude ingenues who, upon reaching this titular stage, become ‘not only physically attractive and beautiful human beings’ but the manifestation of ‘excitements taking shape, and the essence of sexual allure.’ On the pages that follow, his girls are laid bare. They gaze at the viewer with languid, limpid, placid eyes, their naked forms imbued by the lens with what Simone de Beauvoir describes as ‘the freshness of secret springs, the morning sheen of an unopened flower, the orient lustre of a pearl on which the sun has never shone.’ They are compliant, complicit creatures, bright-bodied butterflies delicately unfurled for the eyes to caress, the loins to covet.

And they are all, without exception, minors.

The most disturbing image from this horrifying monograph lies, not in its pages, but on its dust jacket. Shot in mythologising monochrome, it depicts Hamilton with one of his many muses: an angelic, bucolic, gap-toothed girl in a white striped dress. She looks genuinely happy.

The photographer grins beside her. His face is her antithesis — leathery, oily, the caucasian skin preternaturally dark. He wears a plaid sportscoat, a polo shirt with both buttons undone, and thick bifocal spectacles. His enormous right hand cups the girl’s right elbow, long fingers nestled in the crook of her arm, pulling her close. His left hand is an upturned claw, balancing his camera, completing the pincer. There is no background but blackness, an infinite void in which the duo seems suspended, smiling.

I recognise the too-long fingers. I see myself, a child possessed. My mind recoils in fear.

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