Lingermyth

Gradually, we grew out of our past, explained away halos and beasts and cities of clouds. History, after all, is written by those that live in the present.

But it’s still there, that old world. Beneath our own, like a first coat of paint. Glinting through chips and scratches.

A dragon’s tail where the TV bumped the wall. Constellations in curtains and hand-blown glass. Ancient actors’ footprints in the dust of vacant stages. Echoes of old in the cracks of the new.

Lingermyth is a collection of those echoes. It depicts a world removed from our own, a world glimpsed in reflections and walls, in old paint and houseplants and long shadows on the ground.

Like street windows passed on a brisk evening’s walk, Lingermyth's photographs imply much more than they objectively show. Although you are eager to be home, and have no right peeking into someone else’s window, you catch plate-clinks and laughter and the unplaceable notes of a song you used to know.

The curtains are splayed, and the corner of your eye finds wine on the table and strange art on the wall. Against the siren song of window-glow it is all you can do to keep walking, and as quick as it came, the window is gone.

All you have, now, is the glimpse you were given, and your mind fills in the gaps. You long to see beyond the frame, to run back and press your nose against the glass and bask in warm window-light, but of course you cannot. You must settle for imagining.

You picture dinner, browned and well-spiced, and the wine, poured and sipped, and the lives of those that poured it, and the cause of their laughter. An inside joke, probably. You are outside. You keep walking.

These images, like windows on the street, are a sort of synecdoche: from a seed of familiarity, we glimpse entire worlds at the edge of our own. Their potency is their unknowability; reality would only disappoint.

Many photographers like to think of their work as a kind of making. Here is an image I’ve made, they say. These photographs, however, are definitively found. They are spontaneous discoveries, glimpses of elsewhere removed of their context, a product as well as an impetus of longing. Nothing here is constructed; it is the viewer who constructs.

Without place or time, without context from which to build, they build on themselves. Together, like a thousand windows glimpsed, they imply something greater. This world existed, they suggest, somewhere far and long ago, and you’re looking at its last remains.

There is a distance in this longing, but there is also a tantalising closeness. The world behind the borders of these images is both unreachable and very near, as near as the hearts between our bones; we are left, at its edge, to dream.

Lingermyth (pdf) is a book of 50 images created as a final degree project for Marine & Natural History Photography at Falmouth University.