psychogeographies
Holga Homescapes
A gallery from the Psychogeographies series
The camera can be the catalyst for exploring a new and exciting overlap between psychology and geography. The lens has the uncanny ability to articulate how places affect our emotions and how we feel about them at a deep, almost unconscious level. Psychogeography helps me see places in new and unexpected ways; it puts discovery back into the mundane. The idea of roaming - better described by the French word errance – pervades my Psychogeographies series. I cross environments, man-made or natural, following seemingly random path lines. This errance always brings a deep sense of freedom, very much the reason why I do it.
I have been in the UK for nearly 12 years now. 12 years minus 7 months, to be precise. These are the 7 months I spent in an emotional no-man’s land while working on a short-term contract back in my homeland. Soon after I had settled back in Spain for these 7 months, it became obvious that I was to upset a delicate and understated process of adaptation to life in the UK, which began in 1996, when I left my hometown. Previous visits to my homeland had been inevitably cushioned by the comforting logistics of brief but intense family reunions. These 7 months were going to be different. The final stage of my UK adaptation – or should I say ‘adoptation’? – was going to be disturbed by an untimely return to Spain. The Spain I found, in the microcosmos of my fragile emotional condition, was a drab, harsh and utilitarian place. These 7 months in Spain would pose innumerable questions to do with my own identity. I felt dislocated, unable to operate as a full-time Spaniard, incapable of regaining my Spanish customs and timetables, forever kidnapped by my UK alter-ego.
These pictures are the result of this state of mind. The photographs were taken with a Holga camera – a plastic toy camera. These images are immediate, unelaborated and affected by the same tunnel vision which would afflict me during those 7 months in Spain. I am back in the UK now. There will be other photographic projects in the future, but I do not anticipate using a Holga camera again. This is true because the camera broke down after a few rolls of film uncannily coinciding with the end of my 7-month stay in Spain – it was a toy camera after all. My Holga pictures are a memento of a difficult parenthesis in my life. As time goes by I find them more and more bizarre. By showing you these pictures I am confiding to you some very personal feelings. Talking to someone about our afflictions makes us feel better. Likewise, your looking at these Holga images will help heal the wounds received during the 7 months when I was not here nor there.
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