Rendezvous

Abstract

The pandemic returned me to photography. It heightened my awareness of movement. In common with many others, during lockdown, I took to walking, increasingly, in my case, with camera in hand. When lockdown lifted, it was Paris that I was drawn to. In a city such as Paris, one of the consequences of the pandemic was a re-enchantment of public spaces. If the lockdown prevented indoor encounters, the public park became a scene of meeting. A sharing of light and shadow. no longer not yet is a response to my encounter with the chairs as I walked in the parks: empty, clustered together in pairs and groups, abandoned at random or carefully arranged, they came to seem like the ghostly traces of a series of meetings that I was either too late or too early to witness. These chairs marked the dehiscence of the present moment; the no longer and the not yet. Who sat here? Who will sit here? Why? What desires filled the empty spaces? The chair is both open and indifferent to such questions, even as they in turn become the prompt to a desire for narratives that might give form to these hauntological meetings. Between documentation and imagination. The photographs and text here are mine, although there are traces of the voices of others, just as there are traces of meeting. The photograph shadows forth that which is no longer there. It produces ghosts, even if they cannot be seen or heard within the frame. The clusterings of words and images gathering here are part of a sequence continuing.