Photographic dream # 16.
January 17, 2012
Anna sends me a link to a photograph.
It is displayed on what looks like the layout of a Facebook page.
The image is of an empty beach, sweeping off to the horizon where a building akin to a castle stands proudly on top of a hill. The sky is dark and the clouds are thick.
Anna poses the question in the text box; ‘Have you been here before?’
It looks much like the Isles of Scilly, possibly Cromwell’s castle on Tresco, at the north west side of the island. If it is, then yes, I have.
Suddenly I am able to climb into the photograph and the scene goes from being static, two-dimensional, to real life.
The beach is now heavily populated and I am stood close to what I thought was a castle but is, in fact, the Duke of Cornwall Hotel in Plymouth.
In front of me are five men, around the age of 22, possibly Anna’s friends; I have never met them before. They each remove their clothes apart from their trousers and proceed to run into a very turbulent sea. They are not the only ones in the water; there are hundreds of people swimming in the surf although the temperature feels like that of winter.
I am then immediately transported back to another photograph, with again, a Facebook style layout.
The image before me presents four girls, one of them Anna who stands on the right hand side of the frame, I do not know the identities of the other three. They appear to be standing in a kitchen; the photo is tightly framed and made from a slightly higher vantage point than the participants. There is a window in the background with blinds reaching half way down and a range of potted plants upon the sill.
The photograph, as detailed in the ‘from the album’ section on the bottom right of the page, reveals that it is a French themed party and each of the girls have drawn elaborate moustaches in black pen upon their upper lip.
I am once again able to enter the photograph, but I am not in the kitchen. Instead I am outside, next to a car on a residential street, it is getting dark and the streetlights are on.
Lined up against a large wall are my cousins Oliver and Eleanor. We are saying goodbye to my friend Andrew’s grandfather; Bill, he hobbles over to wish us all in turn farewell.
My other cousin Sarah then invites Oliver and Eleanor to Bath, where she lives, and suggests they are welcome to visit whenever they would like, enthusiastically describing a typical weekend that could be spent in the city.
They agree to do this sometime.
Then I woke up.
© Tim Mills. Study of lights coming through my window at night # 2. 2012.
