Haunt

Edge of Humanity Magazine

1 year ago

Photographer Gordon Spooner is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘Haunt’. To see Gordon’s body of work, click on any photograph.

I love the idea that people leave a trace of their passing in the places they visit, just as places leave their trace on people.

Places are haunted by their ghosts, people have haunts they frequently visit…

In the novel ‘Solaris’, the dead from the scientists’ past reappear as tangible human beings, though only as the scientists remember them at the time of their death, not as they actually are (or would be, were they still alive). They are indestructible, they can repair themselves. Whatever happens to them, they return to haunt the person whose memory has created them.

A bit like memory itself.

Nick Cave; “Memory is imagined; it is not real. Don’t be ashamed of its need to create.”

I’m beginning to comprehend the relationship between the past and the present. How nostalgia can twist our vision of the world we live in. How a feeling of frustration with the present can lure us into believing the past was better. How we were happier, how the music was better.

Our brains fabricate these memories, they enhance them. They glorify them.

Then they come back to haunt us.

Artist Statement

All that is solid melts into air. 

I'm interested in the transience of life, of things. 

I’m interested in the moment you realize things weren't the way you thought they were. 

What you hoped was solid, in truth, never is.

My time spent as a cinematographer has heightened my desire to tell stories, to suggest a before and an after. 

I want, via emotion, to merge fiction and reality. Memory and imagination.

I want my viewers to feel like they're looking at characters from an obscure movie. Seen once and never forgotten. Characters they could identify with, characters who could've been their friends.

Characters who helped them to grow.