We Live In A Political World: #235 / Repairs And Alterations

Truman Road and Stoke Newington Road, 12:01 p.m. - 12:34 p.m.

We tend to think of photographs as capturing, within the frame we see, a single instant in a flowing current of disappearing time. The picture above, which appeared in an article in the July 29, 2018, edition of The New York Times Magazine, depicts a corner located in London, England, over a period of time that was approximately one-half hour in duration, the photograph having been taken on June 18, 2009.

I was arrested by this picture, and by the other photographs that have been published with the online version of the article, because the photographs do, as the article explains, provide "repairs and alterations" to our normal line of sight, to the reality we know, and seem to imbue a single photographic frame with "a sense of eternity." Online, in fact, the commentary published in The Times' Magazine, by the English writer Geoff Dyer, is titled, "How To Photograph Etermity."

One of my favorite Bob Dylan songs is Carribean Wind, which asks, in one line, "Did you ever have a dream that you couldn't explain?" Haven't we all? And haven't we all had moments, in dream or in what we think of as "real life," in which we sense that we exist, somehow, in some other dimension, but a dimension of reality to which we have no automatic and reliable access?

It is a privilege to be able to bring forth this "sense of eternity" by merely having recourse to a book, and turning the pages. The photo above, and the one below, and the photos collected in the online version of Dyer's article, come from The Corners, a book by the photographer Chris Dorley-Brown.

If you ever had a dream that you couldn't explain, this book will not explain it. But my sense is that it may well be able to "take you there."

The photo immediately below was taken in June, 2009 in London. The Rio Theatre pictured is not the Rio Theatre located at the T-intersection of Soquel Avenue and Seabright in the City of Santa Cruz. But it looks a lot like that intersection, for those familiar with that place.

Which reinforces my thought that there are, perhaps, many dimensions of reality that we can never explain, but of which we do get little glimpses, now and then.

Perhaps, and just perhaps, there are more to come.