Why This Is Hell

Or at least I'm being on display - photos, printed big and framed. This is the rationale:

Defamiliars
Andrew M. Butler

The best science fiction defamiliarises the everyday and makes the strange seem mundane. As reader, critic and teacher of the mode, I cannot but look at the world with sf eyes.

I look to be defamiliarised, to see the world as an alien place or full of strange things. There are the Pyramids of Wincheap, the supernova in a streetlight, the Fairies of Habitat. Mike, suited and booted – and no doubt bored with the oldsters – looking for all the world as if he has slipped through time from the 1950s, the blue haze of smoke trapped in oblique sunlight, Ollie, looking more suspicious than he really was, smoke caught in the air. Moments which are there now only in the pixels.

I am also seduced by graffiti – messages left for others to read, inviting dialogue. Elsewhere I have been told that WOLVES ARE MEAN and that SPAIN IS DIFFERENT and it has been suggested that I FOLLOW THE WHITE RABBIT, presumably by a fan of The Matrix.

I am drawn to reflections which open up new worlds – into the flatness of the abyss, into the abysmal flatness, into mirrors, into glass, into water, where surfaces play against distances, and the viewer strains to orientate themselves in space and time. The flatness of the paper contrasts with the depth of the fields in view, the distance between the viewer and the image and the distance reflected in the glass of the frame.

And finally – rarely – I am tempted by Photoshop, to create something alien from the elements of the world. Blake saw a world in a grain of sand – I saw a satellite orbiting a planet in a shopping centre sculpture, the British Museum roof and a pint of Guinness, and something sexualised in a piece of modern architecture.



Powell Building (mostly first floor), North Holmes Road Campus, probably until about Christmas.

( Don't click! )

Don't say I didn't warn you...

Some days out it's just shapes




Or light



Relax



Wait



Until it's time to go home



Or fall back on homage (to Abrinsky)

Toby's Light from the North blog has borrowed my semi-ironically titled picture "Leicester - It'll Be Good When It's Finished" for an entry

I have nothing against Leicester (well, maybe against Leicester buses), and have made similar comments about Coventry, Manchester, Birmingham and London, albeit not necessarily with photographic evidence. I hope to get back next year, to view the finished architecture of High Cross and The Curve.