Abstract

Patrick Keiller, ‘Stonebridge Park’ and ‘the subjective transformation of space’

Highlights

  • Practical, and so the collection consisted of 35mm colour slides’ (in Sinclair 2006, 292)

  • In 1978 Keiller began a course at the Royal College of Art, hoping – as he put it – to ‘develop’ his photographic practice (2002, 125)

  • There he discovered that his creatively melancholic approach to the London cityscape had a history, DOEHLWRQHPRVWO\GHULYHGIURP3DULVLDQWUDGLWLRQV2IURPWKH¶ÁkQHXUVDQG daydreamers’ of Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire and Apollinaire, to the ‘profound despair’ of the Surrealists and their ‘tours’ through rundown quarters of the French capital, precursors to the Situationists’ dérives of the 50s and 60s. Keiller wrote about this heritage in a 1981 essay entitled ‘The Poetic Experience of Townscape and Landscape, and Some Ways of Depicting It’, whose opening VHQWHQFHVGHFODUHDQHZIRXQGFRQÀGHQFHLQWKHYDOLGLW\RIQRQPDWHULDO transformation, achieved by activating and foregrounding the sensibility of the artist: The desire to transform the world is not uncommon, and there are DQXPEHURIZD\VRIIXOÀOOLQJLW2QHRIWKHVHLVE\PHDQVRIWKH adoption of a certain subjectivity, aggressive or passive, deliberately sought or the result of a mood, which alters experience of the world, and so transforms it. (1982, 75)

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Summary

Introduction

Practical, and so the collection consisted of 35mm colour slides’ (in Sinclair (ed.) 2006, 292). The setting becomes a ‘crime scene’ even if its relation to where the actual murder took place is only indirect: as our narrator contemplates the inescapability of his own sense of guilt, ‘written everywhere on the surfaces of things around me’, we scrutinise the image, confronted by the clash of intense narrative subjectivity and grey, indifferent objectivity of the everyday surroundings.

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