I am an anamnesiologist. I study what has been forgotten. I divine what has disappeared utterly. I work with absences, with silences, with curious gaps between things.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

When people ask what I take photographs of, I tell them that I photograph things that are disappearing. This is a get out of jail free card, as the camera is a device we use to preserve a formal impression of content from the oblivion of time. It is true though, that I return frequently to subject matter that is in a state of ruin.

These subjects are compelling to me as they belong to another period; scarred by the routines of the past and weathered by time, yet they persist in our present as artefacts and take on new meaning beyond their former function.

Photographs are themselves temporally mixed: the impression of a photograph was made at the point of exposure, but we regard them in the present. We look backwards, at a photograph’s moment in the past, and something from the photograph works its way into our present.

Perhaps it is because of this return gaze from across time that photographs – once referred to as ‘mirrors with a memory’– have become the dominant media through which we remember. We delegate this task of remembering so readily to our photos - largely collected on our phones - that our recall of events is profoundly altered by them.

Although I live in Edinburgh, and develop my ideas and print my pictures here – in the wonderful Stills Centre for Photography - I have rarely felt the consistent desire to be out in the city with my camera, photographing for reasons other than making an income.

For my photography ‘practice’: the practice of seeing, observing, noticing, controlling, translating; the practice of interfacing with the world through a camera; of reconciling one’s vision of the world with its material facts through mediated perception. I usually return to my hometown of Ashington, Northumberland to do so.

This inability to generate a photographic practice in Edinburgh however, was overcome after reading the novel Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

It is my belief that the World (or, the House, since the two are for all practical purposes identical) wishes an inhabitant for Itself to be a witness to its Beauty and the recipient of its Mercies.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Clarke touches on many themes that relate to photographic practice - such as memory, loss, and the interaction between observer and observable - through her use of ruins and monuments to create the metaphysical space of ‘the House’: a seemingly infinite sequence of halls, filled with various statues, which lost ancient wisdom seeps into after being supplanted by the modern, secular relationship to the world.

The fantastical descriptions of ruins and statues in Piranesi, along with its message of reverence for the (meta)physical world, and of the importance of a relationship beyond the logical with it, found their way into my daily experience of the city I live in.

Outside of the obvious examples that appear on a google search of Edinburgh, I noticed monuments everywhere: plaques, neoclassical decorative masonry, sculptures, churches, and gravestones, the very walls of the city.

I began to meet them with an interest not dissimilar to that the novel’s titular protagonist has for those in ‘the House’. Piranesi’s desire to explore and catalogue each of the House’s Halls and the Statues within them stirred a desire in myself. Instead of a journal and pen, I picked up my camera, and this formed the beginning of this project: Graven Images.

Eventually the Ancients ceased to speak and listen to the World. When this happened the World did not simply fall silent, it changed. Those aspects of the world that had been in constant communication with Men – whether you call them energies, powers, spirits, angels or demons – no longer had a place or a reason to stay and so they departed.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

What was interesting to me lay in the interplay between the subject matter, the medium of photography, our desire to remember and to be remembered, and the ways in which material and technological worlds affect our practices of remembering. The project has concentrated into a typological study of the word ‘Memory’ as engraved on gravestones. Gravestones, like photographs, are markers of time, repositories of memory, sites where the past and present can meet in our minds. Physical stones are a long-standing ritualistic means, whereas photography is a modern, secular means. The message of Piranesi seems to me to be that we are losing touch with the former in favour of the latter.

I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the Houses and all that remains will be mere scenery.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi provides an interesting critique of our contemporary relationship to the world for photography – the modern medium – to confront. On the one side, photographs demand the use of our imaginative capacities when produced and viewed meaningfully.

A photographic practice necessitates a relationship with the physical world – the very reference material for photographs – in ways other art forms do not.

Yet, shifts in the production, storage, and consumption of photography in contemporary culture is contributing to the psycho-cultural shift away from subjective mnemonic rituals to evidence-based, technological operations, reliant on a vast externalized, eternalised, and omnipresent digital archive of photographic images.

And so, in accord with their contradictory nature, photographs can be seen as contributing to, and guarding against – depending on their usage – the atrophy of our relationship to the physical and the metaphysical, particularly in relation to memory.

I am photographing this project using methods that emphasise the physicality of analogue photographic processes to monumentalise the materiality of the medium, the monuments pictured, and memory.

As well as using photographic film – with the intention of enlarging these engravings to human proportions – I have begun photographing directly onto photographic paper, ordinarily used in the darkroom to make a positive print from a film negative.

This produces a paper negative, which displays an inversion of tones and orientation of axes – a negative image, back to front – laying bare discords between human and camera vision, encouraging us to question our acceptance of photographs as stand-ins for the recall of experience.

The inversion also frustrates our attempts to read the word ‘Memory’ ordinarily. Bringing to attention language as a (psycho)technology that is profoundly involved with the translation of experience and the propagation of memory.

I focussed on my memory of being a child in that garden, to the last time when both the world and my mind had been unfettered […] To my surprise I discovered that the act of remembering was extremely potent. My mind was immediately freed, my vision cleansed

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Despite changes to the means through which we construct and preserve memory, we – as Piranesi does – still live among statues: ‘silent presences’ which we can turn to for ‘comfort and enlightenment’. We can find meaning in them and use their form to activate subjective imagination or social memory. Their stillness and their silence run counter to the image culture we experience through our devices. They offer space for reflection, interpretation, and remembrance – through imagination rather than reference – of that which has passed. ■