Searching for the extra-ordinary, hoping for the ordinary.
In late April 2014, I captured a series of images whilst on a group photography workshop in Stockport.
As the spring sunshine brought an optimistic hue to the streets, I tried my best to look for empty spaces, scenes of alienation and eerie alleyways as I filtered the otherwise mundane environment through my viewfinder of (pre-mass-Instagram-adoption) subjectivity.
Today, seven years later and having collectively experienced a global pandemic during which we had been told to stay far away from each other, not leave our homes and almost entirely deconstruct every element of our day-to-day existence, I couldn’t help but think to myself ‘be careful what you wish for.’
In The Decay of Lying (1891), Oscar Wilde said that ‘life imitates art far more than art imitates life ’, and as I queued up outside the local shop during the first lockdown last Spring, the city-centre of Manchester cleared completely of its energetic buzz from bees of all nature, what I saw right there in front of me, truly did imitate the emptiness of my photographs I took years before.
I’d snapped wheelie-bins displaying the number of the beast (666), and an almost demonic-looking retired sports car eternally bound to its driveway, but who knew that countless cars would physically remain on driveways for close to a year, getting a run out only for the weekly supermarket trip? Capturing those devilish numbers marked across wheelie bins might’ve seemed like a fun way to display a premonition of approaching danger, but it wasn’t fun to find yourself stumbling across various Reddit threads in February 2020, when those who clocked-on early to the scope of the virus’ impact, were spreading fear whilst the rest of the world sleepwalked through the initial stages of a pandemic.
This concept of exaggerating the way we see things is of course nothing new, framing these photos this way, I had simply been inspired by countless film noir scenes, dimly-lit sci-fi angles and gritty cinematic visuals that I’d digested over the years, but the portrayal of art is one thing, and experiencing first-hand a truly bleak event is another.
As humans we’re fascinated with the extraordinary: films, books and songs allow us to temporary live hyper-exaggerated existences through escapism. However, this is exactly why we enjoy art - at the end of the day, who wants to experience highly dramatic moments, such as being stuck in a global pandemic? It’s much more convenient to look at a photograph of an empty, shadowed petrol station, of a man walking alone, or of seemingly satanic messages in everyday life.
Through art we will always search for the extraordinary, and we will continue to do so long after the simple ordinariness we crave returns once more.
article originally published in STAT - ISSUE 05
Tom Hodgson is a DJ, producer and music writer based in Leigh.
ig: @tom2trax