F330156: no place like home
On Longing
Susan Stewart
“the souvenir is used most often to evoke a voluntary memory of childhood... it is a childhood voluntarily remembered, a childhood manufactured from its material survivals. Thus it is a collage made of presents rather than a reawakening of a past. As in an album of photographs... the past is constructed from a set of presently existing pieces.”
Austerlitz
W. G. Sebald
“…I regularly set off to explore the outlying districts of the city… to walk through the empty Sunday streets taking hundreds of banlieu-photographs, as I called them, pictures which in their very emptiness, as I realised only later, reflected my orphaned frame of mind.”
/
A history of economic displacement repeats itself as I am forced out of the central London of my childhood to a suburban hinterland. I wander around these unknown areas and photograph, comparing them to 'home'. But did the place I remember as home ever actually exist as I remember it? Is it not a construction of memory? Just as the image I am creating of these alien streets is a construction, dependent on what I choose to leave out of the frame. This is just one of many possible Londons. Picture postcard London is another. Created for tourists. The image of London sold abroad, obscuring the London of my childhood in plain sight. It is conspicuous by its absence.
Susan Stewart
“the souvenir is used most often to evoke a voluntary memory of childhood... it is a childhood voluntarily remembered, a childhood manufactured from its material survivals. Thus it is a collage made of presents rather than a reawakening of a past. As in an album of photographs... the past is constructed from a set of presently existing pieces.”
Austerlitz
W. G. Sebald
“…I regularly set off to explore the outlying districts of the city… to walk through the empty Sunday streets taking hundreds of banlieu-photographs, as I called them, pictures which in their very emptiness, as I realised only later, reflected my orphaned frame of mind.”
/
A history of economic displacement repeats itself as I am forced out of the central London of my childhood to a suburban hinterland. I wander around these unknown areas and photograph, comparing them to 'home'. But did the place I remember as home ever actually exist as I remember it? Is it not a construction of memory? Just as the image I am creating of these alien streets is a construction, dependent on what I choose to leave out of the frame. This is just one of many possible Londons. Picture postcard London is another. Created for tourists. The image of London sold abroad, obscuring the London of my childhood in plain sight. It is conspicuous by its absence.
