I am a stranger in your land

A wandering man, call me sand[1]

Several months ago I had a dream. But this dream was not a series of actions or scenarios. In fact there was no movement at all, just a single image. The image was a photograph, but not a photograph as an object but rather the conditions of a photograph as seen through the viewfinder of the camera. Not the print on paper or the pixels on the screen, but the still image without context or time.

It was clear what I had to do; make this image visible to the observer. More problematically, take it from my mind and give it form. Problematic because I was not sure (and still uncertain) whether I can honor the essence of the image. Sure I can set it up and make the photographs of the scene I dreamed, but will it have the same feeling? Will it take me to that place in my mind? Or will it take me further away thereby extinguishing my dream; fading it to white? Yet this may be the necessary course to take; the dream becomes a palimpsest of the images to emerge.

Even now several months later, after I have taken my first photographs of the scene, the dream is transforming, mutating as I go out on site in an attempt to visualize it. Thus I thought it important to describe the image in the dream with as much detail as possible in order to have a reference for its inevitable transformation.

I am confronted with the initial dilemma: what comes first, or rather what should I write comes first? The headrest or the setting? What did I see first? I saw it all as one. But when I write, one must come before the other. Okay they are not separate, but the seeming incongruity of a headrest standing (planted) in a semi-developed outer suburban housing estate predetermines a separation. At least on behalf of the viewer; why is a sand coloured vinyl headrest from a 1970s car sticking up from a lush green nature-strip? I don’t know, it just is, and seems perfectly normal to me because that is how it was imaged—not imagined—in my dream.  It is meant to be there as sure as a tree can be there, but there is no tree in this nature strip, nor any trees in the expanse of green grass that lies on the other side of the, as yet to discolour, light grey footpath. No trees anywhere, but lots of green grass, and a sand coloured headrest. The shape of the headrest is quite specific; slight concave curved across the top, a convex curve vertically across the front; quite generic yet very specific. (As it would turn out sand coloured vinyl headrests from 1970s cars with the afore mentioned curves are not so easy to find as my trips to the wreckers would reveal.)

The requisite chrome rods elevate the headrest off the grass (ground) giving it a composure commonly reserved for old sepia photographs of a grandparent as a child; you know those classic studio photographs of the early twentieth century. But there is no ‘that-has-been’ noeme in this image, nothing to authenticate a past reality, it is firmly in the present. Even as it fades from memory, not its essence just its details, it is in the present, there is no time in this image, it just is.

It exists on an angle to the viewer, the footpath is running away at about 20 degrees revealing a curb and a small area of black bitumen (recently laid) in the left hand corner. The headrest is situated also on a slight angle in relation to the footpath, closer to 30 degrees from the edge of the image, enabling its left side to give a good sense of its form, as in an isometric drawing. The angle of view is also important; the footpath recedes obliquely to the ground; the eyelevel is close to the ground, possibly about 2 feet above. Thus the headrest has a kind of stature, not the same as ones’ grandmother as a child, yet an object into and unto itself. Sitting in the foreground, close to, but not protruding above the horizon line its sand, buffed-slightly-shinny-worn, colour elopes with the sea of regulation cut grass behind.

This part of my dream seems to be somewhat more hazy, perhaps due to the reality of the perspective through an actual viewfinder; my first attempts at image making. However, as best I can recall some timber skeletons of houses in framing stages sit blurred on the horizon; a reason for being hazy? They rise a little beneath the horizon line suggesting that they may be on the downside of a gentle slope to which the headrest sits on the upside. But the important thing is they are hazy; a haze of heat, or the blur of being out of focus (the background), or the fade of my memory all meshes into one. Sand coloured sticks in various structural configurations. The sky is blue, but a subdued blue of an autumn afternoon, allowing the curb and the headrest to cast their shadows (along with the indiscernible blades of grass), and to provide the final details to the image as I remember it.

“…then a device was invented, a kind of prosthesis invisible to the lens, which supported and maintained the body in its passage to immobility: this headrest was the pedestal of the statue I would become, the corset of my imaginary essence.”[2]