2023. B/W analogue photography, diptych, each part 53 × 80 cm.
Faraway Nearby is based on an analogue black-and-white photographic series from 1997, which at the time remained unresolved.
The motif — a section of woodland with a person lying in the landscape — shifts with the focus of the image, moving from a quiet forest scene to a charged narrative. One image withholds what the other reveals.
When I returned to the series more than twenty years later, I discovered that the last two frames on the roll had been set aside as failed exposures. In retrospect, they became the most compelling images in the series. Where the terms far and near originally described dimensions in space, in this new version of the work they also describe dimensions in time.
The title is borrowed from Rebecca Solnit.
Faraway Nearby, #1
Faraway Nearby, #2