CHAPTER 4: PHOTOGRAPHY, LOSTNESS, AND COGNITIVE DECLINE

Picturing dementia

When I began my research, I brought to it three potential starting points for practical enquiry: dye sublimation printing, Polaroid, and image/text. With each project write up that follows, these will be discussed in terms of: what they are; the reasons for their selection in relation to the research project overall and specific areas of enquiry within this (e.g. various agnosias or unknowings in dementia); how they were deployed in trials leading to artworks completed in exhibition; and how thinking through these materials and methods of working with them contributed to the progress of my practice research.

Contemporary photographic praxis is what I’m most familiar with professionally, and awareness of the ways in which the medium has increasingly been used to interrogate complex medical concerns (beginning with Jo Spence’s works on cancers from the early 1980s onwards)³¹³ is in part what enabled me to consider conducting my own research into dementia. In order to place the creative practice aspect of this into context, I will open by briefly tracing key photographic approaches to dementia in the work of comparable practitioners.

My starting points for this discussion are eight contemporary photographers who have completed or ongoing projects related to dementia: Matthew Finn, Maja Daniels, Christopher Nunn, Stephen DiRado, Sofie Mathiassen, Jalal Shamsazaran, Cheryle St. Onge and Peter Granser, all of whom have won awards and/or produced acclaimed publications on this subject and, as such, can be said to represent primary examples of contemporary photographic practice in this field. Finn was a recipient of the 2015 Jerwood/Photoworks Award for his long-running project entitled Mother.³¹⁴ Daniels, Nunn, DiRado, Mathiassen, Shamsazaran, and St. Onge each received Bob and Diane Fund photography awards 2016-2021 respectively.³¹⁵ With Granser, whose book Alzheimer was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2005,³¹⁶ these projects are principally responses by single photographers to recognisable individuals with dementia. Of the eight, Finn, DiRado, Mathiassen, Shamsazaran and St. Onge’s works are the most ‘traditional’, using as they do a classic black and white or colour social reportage approach. Nunn's work differs slightly from these in that it sits more towards the canon of contemporary colour documentary with portraiture, but likewise revolves around an individual person with dementia (though in this case the central subject is an acquaintance rather than a relation).

Variation to the above can be observed in the works of Daniels and Granser, both of whom have produced bodies of work about groups of people communally living with dementia. Daniels’ Into Oblivion (2016) was made in a French 'protected care' setting, while Granser’s Alzheimer was produced in Gradmann Haus, an ‘assisted living’ centre in Germany. Both of these bodies of work draw to a degree on deadpan strategies³¹⁷ in the form of typologies (sets of comparable headshots, or identically framed images of the same pair of locked double doors), but do not quite align with Charlotte Cotton’s definition of deadpan as “cool, detached… an objective and almost clinical mode [that] moves art photography outside the hyperbolic, sentimental and subjective."³¹⁸ Daniels’ forwards her work as an investigation into “the politics of ageing in modern society,”³¹⁹ which situates her approach as a critique of institutionalisation, and her use of the word ‘oblivion’ in the realm of being forgotten or abandoned. But ‘oblivion’ also brings to mind darker associations such as nothingness and void.³²⁰ Also, both Daniels and Granser have made images in which certain of their subjects can appear (or be interpreted as appearing) ‘demented’ in the sense of ‘deranged’; strange facial expressions and gestures or behaviours creating a sense of ‘otherness’ that seems to undermine any concern (as in ‘concerned photography’) or desire to inspire empathic awareness in audiences of the work for the individuals depicted.

Although Parkinson's Disease is not strictly speaking a form of dementia – people with Parkinson's have symptoms in common with dementia (particularly of the Lewey Bodies type), such as motor difficulties and cognitive impairment, and can go on to develop Parkinson’s Disease Dementia (PDD) in addition – an interesting counter example of work in this related field is Tim Andrews' Over the Hill (2007-2019) of which Andrews is both the subject and instigator.³²¹ Two years after his diagnosis he embarked on a portrait project that had, by the time of its conclusion, involved four hundred and twenty-five photographers,³²² all selected and invited by him to take his photograph, and the resulting collection of imagery is comprised of a very wide range of portraiture styles which, together, provide a heterogeneous impression of the same central ‘character’. The diversity of approaches by so many photographers, all in awareness of Andrew’s degenerative condition, serves to demonstrate that visual strategies applicable to people with neuropathologies need not be limited to the kinds of social documentary and contemporary art photography identified as examples previously, however exemplary they may be.

While Arabella Plouviez and Anna Fox are, again, examples of individual photographers focussing on specific individuals (i.e. their parents), both take a more oblique approach, and the inclusion of significant text with the imagery also distinguishes their works from previous examples. In Plouviez’ 2013 work Alzheimer’s: A Quiet Story,³²³ the photographs are only pictures of a someone with Alzheimer’s in the sense that they are of the particular domestic context in which that person – Plouviez’ mother – once lived. Images of empty chairs and beds in a home setting are paired with minimal text (single words such as ‘absent’, ‘lost’, ‘forgotten’)³²⁴ that, in conjunction with the project’s title, serve to imply deeper meaning to the oblique photographic ‘portraits’ that these might otherwise not have immediately suggested.

Similarly, Plouviez’ contemporary Fox also combines a use of text with image in My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words (2000).³²⁵ This tiny limited edition artists’ book (7.5cm x 10cm) pairs images of Fox’ mother’s very tidy cupboards with aggressive quotes by her father in a cursive font reminiscent of those used in formal cards (such as wedding invitations or expressions of condolence) – a typeface more in keeping with the photographs of flowery china and cut crystal than the words they are used to express, that Fox qualifies as her ‘father’s rantings’,³²⁶ e.g. “She should be fried in hot oil.”³²⁷ Fox doesn’t make explicit whether either of her parents suffered from any specific disorder, but the verbal and emotional disinhibition in the text seems reminiscent of that which can be observed in people with various dementias, which can cause sometimes quite dramatic changes in behaviour.³²⁸

In all the above discussed works, the emphasis is in identifiable or identified individuals or groups of people, variously (directly and indirectly) depicted in contemporary styles. Of the examples forwarded, those by Plouviez and Fox are of most interest in relation to the present research, in the sense that their approach is more oblique. Also, the play of text and image in the works of theirs cited allows for the expressions of complexities images alone cannot always carry, even when presented in narrative series. Overall, however, the strategies outlined are very different to those explored in this research. Further discussion of text with image, and additional examples of approaches to dementia in the broader fine arts, will follow.

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PICTURING CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING ONE

The initial idea for this work (PCU1) came in response to a 2008 BBC online video piece about three people at different stages of their Alzheimer’s.³²⁹ One of these, Christopher Devas, was recorded in a moment during which he struggled to recall ‘moon’: though it seemed he knew what he was looking at, he couldn’t name it unless repeatedly prompted by his wife Veronica. For Devas, the difficulty with name recollection observed in the video can be attributed to aphasia-related anomia,³³⁰ and I began wondering how I could approach this in a piece of work.

With the moon in mind, I started to consider additional objects. A key narrative thread in Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby (2014),³³¹ interweaving the unfolding account of her mother’s dementia, concerns a crop of apricots as metaphor for cognitive decline and Solnit’s attempt to come to terms with this. As well as rotting fruit, the list inspired by Solnit’s mother came to include other circular objects, such as a watch, and things misplaced such as keys, spectacles, phone, lipstick – all familiar everyday items the losing or forgetting of I, and by extension the audience for the ensuing exhibition, could relate to. In relation to misperception, I also sourced some partially destroyed prints and emulsions from my archive. The prints had suffered water damage, and the ways in which this had altered them – the surfaces in areas where faces once were having been partially or wholly obliterated – visually corresponded to the dementia induced prosopagnosia Solnit’s mother experienced. As for the emulsions, these were negatives that had curled away from 5” x 4” glass plates in ways that partially concealed portraits of children in clothing reminiscent of the 1950s. Given their apparent age and state, I thought they might be seen as traces of childhood memories that, in dementia, are often reported to be last to fade.³³² So this installation began with a specific incidence of anomia, and grew to include consideration of related agnosias such as progressive forgetfulness and inability to recognise familiar things and faces, all of which I intended alluding to through images of objects.

In parallel, I selected the material to use in the finished work, which had its source in a small domestic dye sublimation printer; the Canon Selphy CP780, hereon in referred to as the Selphy. This machine produces 10cm x 15cm prints resembling typical family album snaps, which is the usage it was originally marketed for. What interested me, however, was its printing process: cyan, magenta and yellow dyes plus a clear protective overcoating are separately layered in sequenced 11cm x 17cm rectangles onto a ‘ribbon’ of very fine acetate. This long ribbon is housed within a sealed cartridge which, once used, is normally discardedand, as such, is a waste byproduct. Extracted from their cartridges, used ribbons reveal images – or rather, vestigial images, as what can be seen are the traces remaining after areas of ink are transferred to prints via thermal evulsion. When unspooled, the ribbon’s fragility also becomes apparent; the thinness of the acetate gives it a very delicate, diaphanous quality. The fragility and semi-transparency of this material suggested that it could potentially be used in relation to visual misperceptions in dementia and the ephemeral nature of memory. The starting point for work with this material was a test piece produced during an artist residency in 2016. For this, I randomly selected CMY ribbon frames and mounted each colour section onto separate pieces of sheet perspex, which were then cemented together with the images aligned, one on top of another, to form a block. The test was the result of a question about form rather than content; it proved that the ribbon could be used to create a photographic object that had an illusion of three-dimensionality, but the resulting object didn’t help to suggest how to take the idea further until I began my doctoral project.

In colour discrimination studies, people with dementia (of the Alzheimer’s type in particular) were found to more easily perceive colour difference in the yellow to red than green to blue spectrums.³³³ In addition to colour, sensitivity to contrast can become impaired³³⁴ and yellow, as the palest of the three Selphy ribbon colours, could be more easily accentuated with lighting and thus made to stand out most clearly in an installation. With these points in mind, twelve objects selected for inclusion in an installation were photographed, printed in black and white (to enhance contrast), and selected strips of Selphy ribbon were then trimmed, transferred to perspex rectangles, and cemented together with the cyan layer at the bottom, the yellow uppermost, and the magenta sandwiched in between.

Choosing to develop the 2016 residency test piece necessarily involved cementing Selphy ribbons into perspex blocks, which meant putting aside the advantages of this material’s delicate quality, but a method of display evolved from this decision that, to a degree, restituted some of its ‘floatiness’ – by suspending the blocks from above with fishing lines. The decision to then hang the perspex pieces together in a diffuse group, rather than individually dot them around the available space, was based on an evaluation of the size and shape of the room in which they were exhibited, which measured 3.5m x 6.5m. The positioning of the work took audience circulation into account but, more importantly, created the condition in which the space became part of the installation in the sense of framing it. Given the restricted size of the perspex encased Selphy ribbon segments (11cm x 17cm x 1.8cm as finished blocks), this created an installation in which this material could have presence in terms of scale and import despite the small size of its individual elements. The addition of a white circle on the floor below the work was intended to further define the physical boundary of the piece by visually indicating that work was present, and thus prevent anybody walking into it , but also act as a light reflector, activating the images suspended above by illuminating them indirectly.

When backlit, all that could be seen from a distance was the light reflecting off the blocks’ yellow top surface. During the exhibition period I tested two different kinds of lighting: one source was a powerful old tungsten photographic studio lamp, and the other natural light from the window, the former in place for the evening of the preview only, the latter used throughout the remainder of the exhibition. Both means of illumination successfully created the desired backlighting effect for the top surfaces of the pieces, and also provided reflected light via the white circle on the floor, allowing the embedded images to became apparent as you approached – albeit not to the degree initially hoped. The ability to walk all the way around the work, regardless of how it was lit, altered the way the perspex pieces appeared to the viewer due to the fact that the lighting sources were on one side only.

An interesting precedent for the use of perspex in work about dementia is Becky Shaw’s Twelve Museums (2002).³³⁵ This sculptural work resulted from regular conversations between Shaw and filmmaker Michael Gill about his “thoughts on… the origins of civilisation, sometimes using this as a material through which to articulate his extraordinary insight into the processes of his [Alzheimer’s].”³³⁶ According to Joan Gibbons, this piece traced Gill’s increasing difficulty in communicating coherently – an inability to maintain his train of thought leading to “sentences that lost their goal and changed direction midway.”³³⁷ The resulting labyrinthine artwork is a glassy architectural construct “incorporating deadends, false corridors, rooms that back on [sic] themselves and rooms that are too small to have anything in them,”³³⁸ into which the artist archived meaningful items, images and words, mapped into the form according to temporal charts of Gill’s recorded utterances. Through the transparent perspex bounding these representations, repetitions are said to have been visible,³³⁹ which leads me to think of the work as a fitting attempt to ‘echo’ Gill’s disordered thought processes, albeit in a highly structured way. Also, though the artwork is closely tied to a specific person, the result is an abstraction rather than a portrait and, as such, can be seen to have transcended its source in the sense that, in order to appreciate it, it’s not necessary to know the identity of the person with dementia collaboratively involved in the work’s creation. Shaw’s piece also combines image and text, and points to what Chadwick called “the idea of photography as potentially a three-dimensional medium,”³⁴⁰ which is something I’ve also endeavoured to achieve in my research as a way of materially rendering the photographic both familiar and unfamiliar.

In my finished installation, the suspended perspex blocks were immediately apparent as you entered the exhibition space due to reflected light. By hanging them from above with near invisible fishing line they also drew attention in that they appeared to hover weightlessly in mid-air, an impression reinforced by their pleasing tendency to move – at the slightest touch, they would slowly, gently turn for extended periods of time. The images embedded within the blocks drifted into partial view as you approached them. These traces appeared to be almost holographic as the Selphy ribbon’s three colour separation, distanced by 6mm thick perspex, hazed image contours, creating a shimmering effect. Although I’d realised that the ‘gilt glinting’ I’d observed (the light reflecting off the yellow top surfaces of the perspex blocks) reminded me of gold leaf, it wasn’t until the installation was in place that I realised why this might be significant: gold leaf is not a material a viewer would expect to be able to see through. As such, the coming into view of images through something one might have assumed to be entirely opaque reinforced the effect of conceal/reveal I’d aimed to produce – the falling away and appearing of familiar and unfamiliar in Solnit’s definitions of lost, the combination of which I’d conceptualised as lostness and was using, in this installation, in relation to the agnosias suggested by Devas’ and Solnit’s mother’s Alzheimer experiences. As the white circle beneath the blocks didn’t reflect light as much as initially hoped, the slightly greater effort required to see the images in them struck me as reminiscent of that involved in memory retrieval, specifically in the phenomenon called tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) or lethologica: the feeling that occurs when something – typically a word or name – can be almost but not quite accessed.³⁴¹ At such times (which can be of short duration or last for days), what we seek to remember is at once known and unknown; we often say in such moments that we ‘know’ the thing we’re trying to recall, even though it is ‘beyond us’. In the experience of TOT, then, the feeling is at once of familiarity and unfamiliarity combined and, in the sense that we are then in a liminal space, constitutes a form of lostness. The fact that I arrived at this insight through an accident of the light in this piece of work doesn’t make it any less relevant or illuminating.

A serendipitous ‘failing’ of the work was that, over the two week period of the exhibition, three of the twelve suspended blocks fell to the floor. Each time, I removed the fishing line but left the blocks exactly as and where they had come to rest within the white circle. If this failing could be considered a form of progression, the pieces in question thus shifted from semi-legibility when still suspended to complete obscurity as, on the ground, no light could shine through to activate the images within. While lethologica is something that anyone can experience and increases in frequency as we get older,³⁴² it becomes notably more acute in dementia.³⁴³ Veronica Devas rightly points out that, compared to people not living with dementia, her husband Chrisopher’s difficulty with recalling things like ‘moon’ is dissimilar³⁴⁴ in that what he forgets falls increasingly beyond retrieval. Although cognitive abilities are known to change as part of a normal, healthy ageing process, in dementia there is marked “progressive decline in two or more cognitive domains, most commonly involving episodic memory and executive functions, that is sufficient to cause social or occupational impairment,”³⁴⁵ and it’s this irreversible functional impairment that distinguishes difficulty with lexical retrieval or naming in dementia from the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon the rest of us sporadically encounter. I was initially disappointed that some blocks had failed to remain in position but, ultimately, their falling served to remind me that the route to empathic understanding – through lethologica, via lostness – that this work helped me to discover had limitations compared to the severity of cognitive decline.

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PICTURING CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING TWO

Unlike PCU1, which originated in observation of aphasia in a video, this project (PCU2) began with thinking through a specific photographic process – Polaroid, which I first played with in 1987. At that time I didn’t have particular reason for my interest, as in a specific project to use it for, but I was curious about it as a material and so undertook some experiments, in the course of which I accidentally discovered how to ‘pop’ prints: holding one up to a heat source in hopes of speeding development, its acetate window and chemical backing unexpectedly separated, creating an empty pocket of space between them and, in the process, altering the quality of the image in the emulsion. These tentative experiments ended there, as without a purpose – an idea they could be meaningfully applied to – it wasn’t clear to me how or why to continue with them. But they were stored away for future reference. It just took me three decades to finally come up with a project Polaroid as material had a relevant place in.

Currently, Polaroid is a photographic support that, once exposed, is immediately processed and rapidly becomes a positive print. Each Polaroid consists of a light sensitive emulsion sealed within a pouch that also contains its means of development. My interest in using Polaroid in my research stemmed initially from an understanding of it as a familiar – iconic, even – photographic object. As Polaroids have traditionally been exposed with dedicated cameras and developed in the moment and in situ, and as the most popular (i.e. domestic) forms of this material can therefore seem unique, in that they are supposed to be one-off positive prints rather than derived from any replicable process, they tend to be imbued with an aura of authenticity (of the Benjaminian kind previously discussed). As such, I thought it might be interesting to play with that perceived authenticity by making work that rendered this material at once familiar and unfamiliar, as another means of testing the Solnit derived definition of lostness at the origin of and central to my research.

The material I had to work with, however, was not the same as that encountered in my 1980s experiments as, in 2008, Polaroid Corporation began to wind down production of the films I’d initially tested. Another company, Polaroid B.V. (previously Impossible Project), then took on the challenge of continuing instant film production, but this required a complete reinvention as it didn’t inherit the corporation’s original photochemical formulas, which meant that I too had to begin experimentation from scratch. The discovery that the Polaroid B.V. product didn’t perform like its predecessor was a disappointment, but this setback resulted in a different approach, enabled by another way in which Polaroid B.V. differed from Polaroid Corporation – it had developed a printer, called Instant Lab, which permits the exposure of its films via smart phones rather than cameras. With the aid of this machine and an app, phones that fit its ‘dock’ can expose the films within. This printmaking process is advantageous in that it enables the reproduction, at will, of any digitally born or digitised analogue images – an experience very different to using the films with a camera. The ability to reprint photographs repeatedly removes any anxiety one might have about destroying unique originals, opening up more possibilities for work with this material than I might otherwise have been able to envisage.

Experimentation began with the extraction of emulsions. A disadvantage of these is that, removed from their iconic pouches, they no longer look like Polaroids so lose the ‘aura’ of assumed uniqueness their otherwise familiar, culturally charged appearance can suggest. But the extraction process itself is what sparked the idea for the final work. Separating emulsions from the acetate windows they’re attached to requires their submersion in water and, once freed, their movement in liquid is reminiscent of jellyfish. Delicate, undulating contractions and expansions ruffle then unfurl the material, concealing and revealing images in fluid movements that are fascinating to observe, in part because they appear to transform a photographic substrate into something more akin to lively organic matter. And from there, the material itself began to suggest what it might be used for.³⁴⁶

At the same time as the above discovery, I was trying to find out whether there was any known neurological basis for the clouded thoughts experienced in dementia. As discussed in the Cloud chapter, the sciences seemingly have no interest in this subjective phenomenon, so I turned instead to theorisations of memory function and dysfunction:

Memories are formed when chemical signals strengthen the connection between neurons… If the connections among neurons weaken or are lost, so is the memory.³⁴⁷

In current understanding, memories are thought to form and become reinforced in repeated reformation as neurons ‘communicate’ with each other across synaptic clefts. These gaps between neurons are extremely small (~20 nanometers) but significant because neurons aren’t contiguous, so it’s in this space between them that their electrical signals, translated into chemical messages, are transmitted to other neurons for reconversion into ‘comprehensible’ electrical signals again. While neurons throughout the brain are thought to have different functions or specialisms, the above outlined communication process is understood to remain the same, so neural processing – of perception, language, learning and memory, for example – also involves electrical-chemical-electrical signal translation between neurons through synapses.³⁴⁸

In relation to this, the Polaroid emulsions seemed to have a lot of potential. I first considered using them in a work that was kinetic (real emulsions in containers rocked by mechanical means) but, having filmed several in water while washing them, projection seemed a more appropriate way of alluding to electrical-to-chemical processing in the brain. As “water is the main ingredient of both the fluid inside the neuron… and the outside fluid that bathes the neuron,”³⁴⁹ the latter also known as the ‘extracellular fluid’ that fills the synaptic cleft, it still seemed important to use water in the piece, which meant that this had to be an installation rather than a typical multichannel video work. This also suited me in that the latter way of exhibiting tends to seem two-dimensional (e.g. videos displayed with screens or projected onto flat surfaces), when a key aspect of what I’ve been investigating through my research is how the photographic can be, or seem to be, sculptural, and thus both familiar and unfamiliar.

As water was to be a material in the work, determining the finished form of the installation began with deciding what kind of vessel to contain it in – working my way from science lab glass equipment (such as Petri dishes) through goldfish bowls and cookware to arrive, finally, at washing machine windows as the best solution. Given that the experience of dementia is, for those people living with it, more domestic than medico-scientific, it seemed appropriate to use objects drawn from familiar home settings even if, once removed from washing machines, the windows appear less recognisable as such – become found objects or ‘readymades’, and readymades are also the familiar made unfamiliar. The particular window I eventually selected had a base that was convex or ‘dimpled’ rather than flat, which meant that a greater quantity of liquid was required for coverage. For the water to serve as a projection ‘screen’ pigment was also needed; white ink and paint were tested but rejected in favour of whole fat milk, which was the medium that best remained homogeneously suspended in water over time. This was a also a pleasing solution in that the use of an everyday organic matter, like milk, as means of creating a cloudy projection screen paralleled the use of other familiar domestic materials in my research. The milky liquid in the dimpled window base resulted in a softening of the projected image towards the circumference, where the water was deepest, and in the centre, where it was shallowest, the dimple’s proximity to the liquid’s surface appeared as a small darker circle, the overall effect reminiscent of the pupil and iris in an eye.

Three projection tests were undertaken in two different spaces, and in each instance I used fishing line to hang washing machine windows within a steel frame. During the first test I was so focussed on how well the projection up into the glass vessel from below would work, I forgot that the light would continue through it to the ceiling above. My first thought when I saw this was that it was a disaster – that I might have to work out how to block or hide the secondary projection if I decided to take the work further. But this ‘accident’ of the light ended up being a key element of the finished work. Though the glass and liquid also alters the projected imagery, the quality of the secondary projection is mostly affected by the distance between projector and ceiling. In my third and final test the ceiling of the space, at approximately 6m, was significantly higher than previously, so the image apparent on it was larger and less distinct, reminiscent of what can be seen within a dim camera obscura. The distance between projector and ceiling also served to mitigate the danger of the secondary projection overpowering the more intimate scale of the smaller one in the washing machine window below it, while increasing the impression of it being sky-like. It then also began to remind me of seeing a moon semi-obscured by a hazy layer of cloud, with the movement of the Polaroid imagery across the projection area like another layer of cloud drifting by, as with skies in which lower clouds can sometimes move at different speeds and directions than ones at higher altitude. I’d hoped a transformation in the secondary projection would visually suggest a breaking down of chemical communication between neurons, but its cloud-like appearance was unexpected – and very welcome.

Two slow motion videos of Polaroid emulsions in water were used in all three test projections; one a studio photo of coins (that had originally been made for PCU1 as another example of the kinds of objects people often tend to forget/lose), the other of children visiting a zoo drawn from a View-Master reel in my collection. Of the two, the latter was most successful in the sense that the image was less abstract. This legibility proved particularly interesting in the third test; the more distinct the imagery in washing machine window was, the more comparatively abstracted it seemed on the ceiling above it – familiar and unfamiliar both originating in the same projection – and this transformation became the way to visualise the disruption of memory the work was intended to allude to.

I reached this stage of the project in March 2020, and Covid restrictions meant that I had to wait until June 2022 before I could begin work towards completing it in exhibition. In my tests I’d suspended washing machine windows with fishing line as a direct development of the method used in PCU1. I considered that, similarly to the perspex pieces in that work, a washing machine window is a weighty object, and while I hoped the video projected into one would create a floating effect, I knew from the experience gained with PCU1 that suspending it by almost invisible means would definitely reinforce this impression. But I also knew it would be hard to justify in a public display, as there were durability and safety issues (e.g. liquid hanging over electrical equipment), so had to come up with another approach. A 1:10 scale maquette was made of the form I imagined, which I then produced for exhibition. In the finished work, the washing machine window was held in position on steel rod fashioned into a hoop with single leg support. Its base was a vaguely eye-shaped wooden frame, surfaced with Dibond and cupped by curved clear perspex sheets held in place by bolted strips of steel. The size of the piece was determined by the throw of the projector – the optimal distance between it and the washing machine window base. Similarly to the white circle on the floor under PCU1, the perspex sheet was partly there to define boundaries around the washing machine window but, though transparent, it also gave the object physical presence in the exhibition space.

As to the video this floor piece framed, it was comprised of two different kinds of footage. The first was multiple recordings of different Polaroid emulsions in water, the second ‘filler’ shots of winter light in my kitchen. The window glass is Victorian, and looks perfectly smooth until its fabrication defects – irregular dimples and waves – are revealed by projected light. In addition, at a certain time of day in the year the sun shines through a tree at the end of my street and, if it’s also breezy, shadows of waving branches animate the rippled light hitting the kitchen wall. Filmed, this looks vaguely organic, like abstract medical imagery of microscopic structures pulsing, perhaps, but as you watch faces reminiscent of old photos seem to emerge and dissolve in the shimmer. In a way, this confluence of glass, branch, breeze and light producing something I could use was pure luck, but several decades of practice as photographer means I’m well trained in observation and recognition of potentialities in chance appearances and patterns. Though fascinating to watch in itself (in the way that flames are), the footage became the ‘material’ in which undulating Polaroid emulsions appear to surface before blurring back into the wash of flickering light. The piece as a whole is obviously not a magnified, literal representation of what might occur in the synaptic cleft as neurons attempt and fail to process perception and memory, but it is intended as an abstracted visualisation of this. Misperception can be seen as the ‘clouding’ of imagery on the ceiling – as a disturbance of the electrical-chemical-electrical flow towards recognition and comprehension.

According to Caterina Albano, moving image “figuratively replicates the physical and psychological thresholds of the self, the flow of stimuli that move through the conscious and unconscious layers of reality and mind alike.”³⁵⁰ For scientists and philosophers the cinematic soon became a metaphor for conceptualisations of subjective perception and cognition, likening these to “the images of a film camera”³⁵¹ which reflect the self as “an assemblage of disjointed sensations, thoughts, emotions and memories.”³⁵² This in turn enabled artists to exploit the medium’s potentials as means of visually representing “the inner film of the mind,”³⁵³ with the screen as an externalised projection of this.³⁵⁴

As such, it’s easy to understand why contemporary artists making work about cognition are so drawn to video: as examples, Suki Chan and Matt Denham. In 2022, Chan exhibited, at Bluecoat in Liverpool, three videos under the collective title Conscious: Memory (2019), Hallucinations (2020), and Fog In My Head (2022).³⁵⁵ Memory pairs single channel panning shots of such things as rock formations, aerial landscapes and brain imagery with voiced over recollections of past life piloting experiences. In both of the other films people living with dementia appear – Wendy Mitchell and Pegeen O’Sullivan – and in Fog In My Head, Mitchell is briefly joined by an actor representing her mother in a reconstruction of an hallucination. The same footage of, for example, aerial landscapes, reappears across all three works, but this repetition doesn’t seem to be related to that which can be experienced in cognitive decline. The gallery staging of Hallucinations and Fog In My Head seemed more reminiscent of care settings my mother used to take me to in the early 1980s (dated furniture and clothing, wheelchairs and zimmer frames), jarring with the more contemporary and homely settings in which Mitchell and O’Sullivan were filmed, and this made much in the videos then also seem more illustrative than equivocal. By contrast, in Matt Denham’s Martha [Alzheimer's Machine III] (2016-20),³⁵⁶ the characters are fictional. The work is comprised of a series of six short films that aim to “explore the effect of Alzheimer’s disease on the way we see, interpret and understand the world,” presented in immersive, and vaguely Beckettian, installations. Interestingly, algorithms fragment narrative by shuffling the videos so they can’t be reseen in the same order (a different approach to repetition), and overall there’s more a sense of the gallery as a frame than a viewing room. Nonetheless, the use of recognisable people, real or fictional, in the work of both these artists raises similar questions about the limitations of personification that I’ve discussed in relation to photography, in that we then tend to look at dementia rather than into cognitive decline.

Although Chadwick used images of identifiable people in her earlier practice (herself, her mother), she gradually turned into the bodily in ways that opened towards much bigger questions about identity and lived experience than she tends to be credited with:³⁵⁷ “On the threshold of biology and language, being both body and sign but not strictly either, is it possible to create object-images of a conscious flesh that takes pleasure in its non-submission to the word?”³⁵⁸ Chadwick’s resistance to consideration of the self as other than embodied perhaps helps to explain why she was more attracted to the materialities of sculpture, installation and photography, with light occasionally deployed as the ‘ethereal’ link between these, rather than media like film. Chadwick’s use of light in series of works such as Enfleshings (1989) feels closer to my use of projection in PCU2 than the video art examples I’ve just discussed, in the sense that it animates and alludes without recourse to narrative.

Comparison of Chan and Denham’s dementia specific works with Chadwick’s might seem difficult to justify, given obvious differences, but Chadwick can be said to have been approaching similar concerns in her own way: “As object Enfleshings embodies selfhood as conscious meat… a synthesis of energy and matter that is living meat. A red mirror.”³⁵⁹ A stripping of self back to matter, to what matters in matter:

trying towards the realm of pure perception, beyond words, unformed / unshaped, lost, latent… There is a lost knowledge, another eloquence… no structures, no subject object, no language. Flesh-mind… How to grasp that space yet be of this world? Is it courage or folly to abandon to the sweet death of words? Brain stilled.³⁶⁰ 

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PICTURING CLOUDS OF UNKNOWING THREE

When I began my PhD I thought that text/image interplay would be important to consider given certain facets of dementia, such as aphasia, but wasn’t sure in what precise way. As my research progressed, I became increasingly aware of the varied metaphors used by people living with dementia – and also by organisations advocating for them, and others (e.g. artists such as Rebecca Solnit³⁶¹) – as means of accessibly describing aspects of cognitive decline. In the course of my research I categorised the most common of these visual analogies as falling into three broad categories: the archival, the environmental, and the meteorological.

The archival covers metaphors that reference libraries and books (mainly, but also other organisational objects, spaces and principles), most often in relation to memory disorders. The environmental draws on elements of nature and landscape, such as woods, trees, undergrowth etc, typically in reference to the confusions of disorientation and misperception, and in relation to the Tau tangles in the brain that have been associated with Alzheimer’s. Finally, the meteorological references clouds, fog and haze to suggest the perceptual effect of moments when people with dementia experience a ‘zoning out’ or loss of focus, as well as difficulties with recalling such things as vocabulary. The archival and environmental, in analogy, evoke a sense of material form and structure, albeit labyrinthine or chaotic, where the meteorological is more amorphous, but all, though unstable, suggest forms that have easily imaginable tangibilities. As such, they are ways of expressing mental states that aid visualisation, as they use familiar form and imagery to convey something of experiences that are far from familiar, for both the people living with them and those of us attempting to apprehend what those lived experiences might be like. Thus, it can be said that these metaphors have relevance to the visual arts broadly, and they have been invaluable in my own research more specifically in that, when something which in reality can’t be seen – such as disrupted thought processes resulting from neurodegenerative conditions – but can be described in a way that can be envisioned, it becomes possible to conceive means of representing it.

The base medium selected for this third and final project is that of the artists’ book, in direct response to the many dementia-related book and library analogies encountered in the course of my work. The project is in part grounded in a 2019 PhD placement undertaken in the department of contemporary publications at the British Library St Pancras, during which I researched representations of memory in the library’s artists’ book collections towards a possible future exhibition. It can also be said to have been influenced by the onset of the global pandemic and the restrictions this placed on my practice in that, while obliged to work from home, the conception and production of artists’ books was more accessible to me than, for example, a large installation. But, in the main, the impetus for the work was the drawing together of much of my research into dementia, and the move towards working with text and image would have likely led me towards artists’ books as medium regardless of the pandemic. In what follows I briefly consider what artists’ books are or can be considered as, after which I discuss each of the three artists’ books created in the course of this final research project, contextualising where appropriate.

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A “familiar structure as a frame [for]… otherwise elusive meanings”³⁶²

Joanna Drucker acknowledges certain precedents (giving as examples the 18th-19th century book works of Williams Blake and Morris), but situates the "idea of the artists' book [coming] to maturity in the latter half of the 20th century”³⁶³ as the time period in which this form came to be acknowledged as medium, since when there have been many attempts to define what they are, as they

take every possible form, participate in every possible convention of book making, every possible "ism" of mainstream art and literature, every possible mode of production, every shape, every degree of ephemerality or archival durability. There are no specific criteria for defining what an artists' book is, but there are many criteria for defining what it is not.³⁶⁴

For example, publications such as exhibition catalogues and artists’ monographs can be largely excluded because, however aptly designed, they are classifiable as containers for content in a similar way to illustrated books. Confusingly, though this suggests that artists’ books must therefore be radically unconventional by comparison, this isn’t necessarily the case. Even if mass produced and resembling popular formats (pamphlets etc) they can still be artists’ books. Sophie Calle, who amongst other things is known as a prolific book artist, has produced numerous works that, superficially, not only look like ordinary books, they’ve also been editioned in similar fashion. Rather than in special collections, her publications are often to be found on library shelves alongside books about her, which neatly demonstrates how accessible artists’ books can be, or seem to be at face value, as they are not necessarily unique objects. So artists’ books don’t need to be singular in the sense that they’re unusual in some way – though they can very much be that – and don’t need to be hand-made or individually crafted objects either, though they can also be that way. And while they can, as with Calle’s work, resemble popular publications, like novels, they can also not look like books at all, or look like books without arguably, actually being such.

Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box (1934), for example, was produced in an edition of 320. Each archival box in the edition contains ninety-four unbound items, a few of which are images, but mainly facsimiles of handwritten notes on scrap paper. Twenty of these books were special editions which additionally included original artworks. Duchamp’s ‘multiple’ here demonstrates one way of stretching the bounds of what a book can be, and it can be said to have been quite influential. A less well known work by Klaus Scherübel further illustrates just how far artists’ book forms can be pushed, in that it’s an example of something that’s considered one even though it isn’t, strictly speaking, a book at all. It was produced in response to 19th century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s concept for an impossible book – a book so impossible he never managed to do more than conceptualise it as something that, somehow, “would reveal nothing short of ‘all existing relations between everything.’”³⁶⁵ In Scherübel’s take on this, the work is a block of 24cm x 16cm polystyrene with a dust jacket wrapped around it, produced in an edition of 1,500 by Printed Matter in New York.³⁶⁶ The forwarding of these examples is intended to make evident why defining what artists’ books are is so difficult. Once you realise they can be boxes full of bits of paper or blocks of polystyrene, it becomes easier to accept that they can take different scales, be made of all sorts of materials, and have many forms. They can have pages made of glass, as in the sculptural A View Becomes a Window by Olafur Eliasson, which was published in an edition of nine by Ivorypress in 2013.³⁶⁷ They can have the scale and weight of encyclopaedias, be small and slight as passports. And they can be monumental and unwieldy, as in several works by Anselm Kiefer. The Secret Life of Plants (2008),³⁶⁸ for example, is a unique object with pages 190cm x 140cm. Despite their large size the pages appear to be articulated, but as they’re made of lead, so are both toxic and incredibly heavy, it’s hard to imagine anyone turning them. For Drucker, artists’ books embody experiences in that they have a ‘life’, an “ability to circulate on their own [that] suggests an animate quality… the capacity of books to be in the world with an independence and mobility unlike that of any other work of art."³⁶⁹ The suggestion is that artists’ books are accessible as artworks in that they can be engaged with in many different contexts, from formal gallery settings to people’s homes, without the circumstances in which they’re encountered necessarily affecting how they may be read – with the obvious exceptions of Eliasson and Kiefer’s works.

It’s difficult to avoid what Beckett called “[t]he danger… in the neatness of identifications,”³⁷⁰ in the sense that attempts to define anything often fail as exceptions inevitably arise – especially in the arts, where conventions are things that tend to be critically and creatively challenged and engaged with. Drucker’s contention that artists’ books need to maintain some connection to the ‘book’, at the very least as an idea or concept,³⁷¹ could seem risky in this respect. For the purpose of my research the ‘idea of the book’ has been important, however, in that I could then approach books as forms that seem familiar.

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BOOK ONE: The Stereoscopic Atlas of Agnes Osias

During the first year of my PhD I came across a copy of The Edinburgh Stereoscopic Atlas of Anatomy (1905, hereon referred to as the Edinburgh Atlas),³⁷² by chance, in the Wellcome Collection. The form this publication takes is as large sets of A5 cards in volumed boxes.³⁷³ Each card has a pair of stereo photos depicting anatomical details of dissected human bodies that had had numbers pinned to them, with legends corresponding to these numbers (anatomical names of the areas pinpointed), plus a larger piece of explanatory prose.

The cards detail the human body head, toe and everywhere in between, but the ones that initially interested me most were those of heads and their contents – or gradual absence of contents, as heads were photographed at different stages of step-by-step dissection processes. The medical texts are very dry in style, which seemed to me to contrast with the images, in some of which the dissected person’s face, or other recognisable personal features like ears and hair, can be clearly seen. Studying these cards led to thoughts about:

• emptied/emptying space;
• the familiar/unfamiliar inherent in the simultaneously 2D/3D spaces particular to stereoscopic photography;
• harnessing the potentials of dissonance/incongruity and collocation – between text and image, style/content of pictures, tone of voice in prose and poetry, plus the contrast between medico-scientific perspectives of the body/brain and the domestic, lived experience of dementia (the ‘patient voice’);
• ‘putting people in the picture’;
• the possibility of drawing all the above into a book.

My first testing of this book idea took place in the spring of 2018. It began with selecting one of the Edinburgh Atlas cards I’d photographed while at Wellcome and simply rewriting the numbered legend on it – I replaced the words with ones mainly by Wendy Mitchell, whose Alzheimer’s memoir I’d just finished reading at that point, but also some of my own in response. The words of Mitchell’s I used had to do with descriptions of confused thought and the difficulties of living with short term memory loss, but also advantages of said (better ability to keep secrets, for example), aspects of her daily life (i.e. kitchen cupboards, scrambled porridge), and so on. The result was a partially ‘found’ poem in numbered legend form which, paired with the numbered emptied skull in the stereo photos, project into that stereoscopic space the thoughts a person with Alzheimer’s might have in mind still, despite the brain atrophy and neuronal damage symptomatic of that condition’s pathology. The found poetry in the legend also sat at odds with the dry, anatomical prose above it, which I didn’t alter at that stage.

Following this tentative experiment I undertook further research into medical usages of stereoscopic imagery, also in the Wellcome Collection library, and this led to the discovery of other sources of inspiration: Thompson’s Stereoscopic Atlas of the Eye (1912)³⁷⁴ and Bothman’s Fundus Oculi (1939)³⁷⁵ – both ophthalmological equivalents to the Edinburgh Atlas – and Wright’s Selected Pictures of Extraocular Afflictions with Explanatory Notes (1938).³⁷⁶ The latter publication’s content was inappropriate to my research, but its form was of interest in that it was comprised of two separate booklets side by side, bound together by a central spine. The book opening to the left contained explanatory texts about the stereo images in the book opening to the right. I noticed with the right-hand book that I was reading it backwards and found this unnerving, which made it stick in my mind – could a similar device be used to suggest disorientation in dementia? Thus, this double book format later helped to inform, in part, the design decisions that led to the creation of The Stereoscopic Atlas of Agnes Osias (hereon referred to as Atlas).

As an object, then, my Atlas was conceived as two books bound side by side, their pages designed to open to the left and right, and the content split across both, e.g. page 4 of the book on the left and page 4 of the book on the right resemble one related page when viewed in tandem, but because this ‘page’ can be split centrally it’s possible to read their content (both text and stereo images) out of synch with each other. This split page format thus holds the possibility of materially disorientating the reader if they choose to view the pages out of sequence. Initially, the layout of my pages took that of Edinburgh Atlas cards as starting point, a loose constraint to structure the design, but the layout evolved as I considered particular aspects of the book. For example, to write the prose sections of text so that they could flow from left to right pages and still seem to make some kind of sense (grammatically, at least), regardless of whether the pages were in or out of sequence, led to the decision to divide them from one text block, as in the Edinburgh Atlas, into two columns, one per split ‘page’. After mocking up a rough dummy, I realised that the eventual reader of the book might need to use both hands to turn the left and right pages, and that this would be easier if they did so from the bottom rather than the top. As I wanted to integrate a stereoviewer into the book cover, this meant that it would be best placed at the top of the book, which in turn meant that the stereo images would need to be at the tops of the pages. There are not many stereoscopic books with integrated stereoviewers in existence, but those I found in the course of research tended to have the viewers at the bottom of the books.³⁷⁷ Therefore, I had to design my own cover from scratch.

To begin with, the writing of prose sections involved a ‘hacking’ process, whereby I took text from the Edinburgh Atlas and altered single words – e.g. ‘subarachnoid’ became ‘subconscious’ – then gradually intervened more and more until the original was unrecognisable. The ‘rule’ for this ‘hack’ was that the words in the numbered legend poem should appear in the prose it was being paired with, the idea being that both prose and legend poem would be linked and could also be read in relation to the numbers pinned within the head in the stereo images, as if the numbers ‘floating’ within the emptied head cavity might be where the words/thoughts had occurred. Not all the prose and legend poems in my Atlas were produced using this same method, however, as in the process I devised and tested several different writing techniques, developed for the express purpose of creating this book. In all but two prose pieces – one derived from thoughts about aphasia and crosswords, the other inspired by two passages in Annie Ernaux’ Les Années (2008)³⁷⁸ – my texts had at their origin existing texts which I transformed by edit and addition, be the starting points extracts from scientific articles or recipes for calf’s brain soup. As for the imagery the book contains, there is a mixture of photographs, in 2D and 3D, either appropriated from various copyright free sources or produced by myself, which to a degree mirrors my approach to all the written elements the images are bound with.

From the late 19th century through to the mid-20th century in particular, stereoscopy was widely used for educational, military and scientific purposes,³⁷⁹ but is best known as a popular Victorian parlour entertainment. It has not been commonly used in contemporary photography and the wider fine arts – the words ‘popular’ and ‘entertainment’ in the above perhaps helping to indicate one reason for this, in that it has been seen by many as ‘gimmicky’ and, as such, less worthy of serious consideration than more conventional photographic imagery.³⁸⁰ As someone with a long interest in the sculptural potentials of photography, however, I was open to stereoscopy precisely because the optical illusion it produces is perceived as three-dimensional. For it to not seem a contrivance, apt reason for its use seemed key, and my chance encounter with the emptied head imagery in the Edinburgh Atlas, with its potential for suggesting mental spaces, convinced me that my research project provided a perfect opportunity for meaningful application of this photographic technique. In what follows I contextualise my work with it in relation to how it has been understood and utilised in literary and fine arts, and the ways in which it can be considered as relevant to lived experiences of misperceptions in dementia.

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Turning now to Kentridge, Tummelplatz (2013-17)³⁹⁵ is a pair of hand bound artists’ books containing sets of ten stereoscopic photogravures each, provided with an antique desktop stereoscope (of the sort originally used by the military to study aerial reconnaissance photographs and topographical maps in the early 20th century). This is not the only work by Kentridge using stereoscopy – another example being a folio of six looseleaf photogravures with stereopticon called The Stereoscopic Suite (2007)³⁹⁶ – but Tummelplatz is of specific interest in that it takes the form of an artists’ book and, as such, represents a useful precedent for my own work. And, in the sense that the stereoscopic imagery in Kentridge’s artists’ books combine drawing and photography, they may also be seen as loosely comparable to the work by Duchamp previously discussed.

In Langenscheidt Dictionary, the literal translation of Tummelplatz is ‘playground’,³⁹⁷ though for Siri Hustvedt the German also carries connotations of a space of action and commotion, as applicable to adults as it is to children, and points out that in Freud’s use of the term, in his 1914 paper ‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through’, it is “an intermediate region between illness and real life… a field of ‘struggle’ or, more dramatically, as ‘a battlefield’ between doctor and patient… where analysis happens.”³⁹⁸ Kentridge’s use of the term in the title of his artists’ book is described by him as being about “finding the similarities between the studio and the psychoanalytic space”³⁹⁹ – “the nature of the studio and the activity of making sense in it… [and] the material, that is, the format of the artists’ book and specifically the virtual pop-up book: the three-dimensional book that lies flat.”⁴⁰⁰ This concern with two and three dimensions also has parallels to Duchamp, but in Kentridge’s case it additionally takes into consideration the work, in book form, as both a two-dimensional and three-dimensional object in a way that Duchamp’s Stéréoscopie à la main does not. How successful Kentridge’s attempt to equate psychoanalytic and artistic spaces of endeavour in this work is hard to assess, as I have not been able to study it for myself, or find any scholarly critique of it. But I have found it useful to consider Kentridge’s approach to introducing illusion, through stereoscopy, within an artists’ publication.

The images in his artists’ book are of drawings and text, arranged in his studio as if this space were a stage set, which were then photographed stereoscopically and reproduced as printed pages. The work, then, was constructed as sculpture and deconstructed as photographs which, in the Duchampian sense, then need to be ‘reconstructed’ in the mind of the book’s viewer: “The studio becomes a place for the world to be deconstructed – taken apart and then put back together.”⁴⁰¹ The lecture from which this quote is drawn references Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)⁴⁰² which Kentridge later links to the origin of the idea for Tummelplatz. As Kentridge has, in this work, drawn an equation between psychoanalytic and creative space, and as the work of psychoanalysis takes place in the mind or psyche, it is possible to interpret the book as means to enter an aspect of Kentridge’s inner creative process, and in this sense the ‘dream-like’ illusion of stereoscopy is key.

At the beginning of my Atlas, I reproduce a single image of a numbered brain selected from a pair on an Edinburgh Atlas card. This now resolutely two-dimensional photo is printed across two pages with the split between them running down the centre of the brain. To enter the book one must pass through this image, the idea being that the reader will tacitly understand that they are entering the fragmented world of Agnes, my fictional character and, in a similar way to Kentridge’s Tummelplatz, experience the book, as a whole and through the stereographic imagery within, as suggestive of mental spaces.

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“‘Unknown reality’ works like a stereoscope”³⁸¹

Stereoscopy is a form of photography that produces an illusion of three-dimensional space; when two slightly diverging images – one for each eye – of the same scene or object are viewed simultaneously with the aid of a viewer, our brains can process the paired photos as one and interpret them together as having volume and depth.

What’s the difference between the ability to ‘see’ stereoscopic images as 3D and our everyday binocular perception of volume and depth, when in both instances we need our brains to ‘read’ as one the otherwise two-dimensional views we see with each eye? One could be that what we see in real life is before us in both space and time – objects in spatial contexts that we perceive in volume because they are in reality three-dimensional, and that we see as such in real time. By contrast, stereoscopic imagery is a significant step removed from both the spatial and volumetric qualities of the things they depict, and the past moment in which they were photographed; even if we need the same kind of binocular vision to perceive the three-dimensionality in stereoscopy as in our everyday lives, when we use it to view stereoscopic imagery something different occurs. Through the stereoviewer, the space that seemingly opens before us is, in reality, only existent in our minds; it is our brains that ‘see’ the images as three-dimensional, not our eyes, and this psychophysiological effect of binocular vision is called stereopsis.

My Atlas plays with this effect in that there are three ways to view the stereo pairs of photographs: as familiar two-dimensional prints, in 3D when looking at matched pairs through a stereoviewer and, when unmatched, as ‘double exposures’ that also only exist in the mind. The split page construction of the book allows the reader to look at the imagery in and out of sequence both with and without a stereoviewer – and when images are seen out of sequence through a viewer there is a vaguely hallucinatory effect, as both can be seen as overlapping but one will appear to ‘ghost’ the other. This can be compared to the cinematic effect of ‘cross-dissolve’,³⁸² which Bettina Mosbach calls a ‘third image’:

[S]till photography achieves the static equivalent of this 'third image' in basically three ways: (1) through double exposure, whereby an exposed piece of film is reshot with a second image on top of the first; (2) through 'sandwiching', whereby two images are printed on one piece of photographic paper; (3) by shooting into a transparent, reflective surface, capturing both the reflection on the surface and the object behind it. All of these techniques produce a single picture composed of two transparently overlapping images… As Rosalind Krauss has pointed out, surrealist photographers made use of sandwiching and double exposure in order to infiltrate the photographic print with spacing and so 'testify' to a 'cleavage in reality', the essential surrealist 'experience of the real itself as a sign'.³⁸³

In stereoscopy, Mosbach’s photographic ‘cross-dissolve’ happens in the viewer’s mind rather than in print, so the effect that occurs when looking at dissimilar images through a stereoviewer can be considered a ‘fourth image’ following on from her classification. The relevance to dementia of this way of ‘seeing’ the images lies in the visual hallucinations some people living with it can experience³⁸⁴ – an even greater ‘cleavage in reality’ in that they, like stereoscopy and mismatched stereoscopic images, only occur in the mind.

Although stereoscopy has not been widely applied and appreciated in the fine arts there are some notable exceptions, and its surreal qualities have been particularly influential in literary circles. Marcel Proust and W.G. Sebald are known to have been interested in the concept, if not its practice; as both writers were, in their own ways, drawn to the photographic more broadly and to themes of time and memory, it could be said that they were perhaps interested in stereoscopy’s ‘cross dissolve’ potentialities for similar reasons. As to the visual arts, Marcel Duchamp and William Kentridge are key examples of artists who have used stereoscopy.

Duchamp’s almost career-long interest in optics, binocular vision and optical illusion centred in the fact that, with these, art is “not only sited in the work itself, but also in the interaction between the work and the viewer,”³⁸⁵ in that it is “the spectator who ‘makes the picture’.”³⁸⁶ For Duchamp, “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”³⁸⁷ As in stereoscopy the finished artwork can only be completed by coming into being – by ‘blossoming’³⁸⁸ – in the mind of its viewer, it is a form of imagery that is Duchampian par excellence.

According to Octavio Paz, stereoscopy’s attraction for Duchamp also lay in his “preoccupation with the relationship between the second and third dimension.”³⁸⁹ In the sense that I’m interested in the sculptural potentialities of photography I feel some affinity with this concern. The particular stereoscopic work by Duchamp that I would here like to draw attention to is his Stéréoscopie à la main (1918). It consists of a pair of black and white stereo photos of a seascape onto which Duchamp drew, in pencil, geometric forms, thus producing a ‘rectified readymade’ a little reminiscent of stereoscopic cards used in the same period by ophthalmologists as means of correcting astigmatism in their patients.³⁹⁰ For Gavin Adams, in Duchamp’s Stéréoscopie à la main the illusion of three-dimension is so disappointingly weak as to be barely stereoscopic at all, in that the seascape selected is both featureless and almost flat, and the octahedron overdrawn on it hasn’t the volume one might expect of it when seen through a stereoviewer.³⁹¹ I would argue that this is not so difficult to understand when considered with Duchamp’s career-long propensity to bend and break ‘rules’, including his own – to challenge conventions by disrupting an audience’s perceptions, assumptions and expectations – and it can be said that he has succeeded in this aim in that, as Tim O’Riley has forwarded, the work “ultimately seems to achieve a confusion of spatial conventions: the perspectival, the stereoscopic and the photographic.”³⁹²

I have observed in my own work that placing a non-stereoscopic drawing over a pair of stereo photos can produce a sense of incongruity. For my Atlas, I layered a clockface drawn by a person with Alzheimer’s over images of a retina from Bothman’s Fundus Oculi:³⁹³ the drawing was sampled from a common diagnostic tool used in assessment of cognitive decline called The Clock-Drawing Test, and the style of sketch selected is deemed typical of Alzheimer’s.³⁹⁴ When seen through a stereoviewer, the clockface in the foreground – which logically ought to appear to be flat – seems to warp into the illusion of space behind it. This space then looks very distant, like a landscape as stereoscopically photographed from a great height (as if from outside the earth’s atmosphere), though what we are actually looking at is the inside of someone’s left eye. These two very different kinds of imagery are readable separately, but their pairing troubles our encounter with imagery that we cannot help but anticipate will appear to be familiar. The inclusion of the clock face was initially intended as means of introducing numbers to the stereo images that would correspond to the numbered legend below these, and visually mirror the suggestion of temporal disorientation in the prose. The idea for this ‘rectified readymade’ occurred long before I became aware of Duchamp’s, and before I learnt of his interest in optics and stereography more broadly but, though after the fact, the comparison is still relevant and subsequent discovery of Duchamp’s approach to the stereoscopic has expanded and enriched my own.

“the possibility of simultaneous time”⁴⁰³

Duchamp was known to have been interested in the second and third dimensions, but he was also drawn to a fourth. In 1936 he signed Charles Sirato’s ‘Dimensionist Manifesto’,⁴⁰⁴ which posited three areas in which the ‘dimensionist tendency’ had already begun to take effect: “literature leaving the line and entering the plane, painting leaving the plane and entering space, sculpture stepping out of closed, immobile forms,” and a fourth possible area for future development of an entirely new art form – ‘Cosmic Art’, in which ”the human being, rather than regarding the art object from the exterior, becomes the centre and five-sensed subject of the artwork”.⁴⁰⁵ In other words, Duchamp’s proposal that the spectator ‘makes the picture’. The non-Euclidian fourth dimension is not something we can spatially perceive, or even easily imagine, and the same can be said of time, which is another way of understanding the fourth dimension. In the work of Proust and Sebald, that I will now forward here as examples, impressions of time as non-linear – of perceptions of the past surging into the present or the present collapsing into the past – can be read as “literature leaving the line” in the sense of a literary application of stereoscopic simultaneity.

In Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913, hereon referred to as Recherche), the young Marcel reflects on his capacity to vividly mentally visualise recollections, likening this to being "as though one had placed [images] behind the lens of a stereoscope."⁴⁰⁶ Jessica Wiskus points to this serving as an analogy for “a play of the mind as it strives to negotiate the depth between perception and memory... a dimension revealed as if the mind itself operated as a kind of interior stereoscope… that serves as a principal theme throughout the Recherche.”⁴⁰⁷ This ‘internal depth’ is also the dimensional distance between past and present – is time. Wiskus convincingly forwards that the structure of the entire novel is stereoscopic in the sense that it is built around pairs – of characters such as the young Marcel and his older self as narrator – operating in a similar way to pairs of stereoscopic photographs that, when combined, provide an impression of depth: “This sense of the past… springs not from two views of what is immediately present, like binocular vision, but from two views that are temporally dislocated.”⁴⁰⁸

Although the memories of Proust’s characters are intensely visual, they are often triggered “not from a conscious retrieval or his visual imagination, but from the lesser senses of taste and smell.”⁴⁰⁹ As Proust writes, “It is a labor in vain to attempt to recapture [our past]: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling.”⁴¹⁰ The suggestion is that it’s only by chance that senses assist memory function, and that memories involuntarily retrieved in this way are, as a consequence, likely to be more vivid and authentic.⁴¹¹ But are all such memories of unquestionable worth?

In the following passage from W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo (1990), which I quote at length as there are several aspects to it that I found both striking in relation to dementia and useful to consider in relation to aspects of my Atlas work, Sebald’s unnamed narrator accompanies the character Clara on a visit to her grandmother in what one assumes to be a care facility:

The St Martin's home is a large, rectangular building with massive stone walls dating from the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Clara's grandmother, Anna Goldsteiner, who was afflicted with that extreme kind of forgetfulness which soon renders even the simplest of everyday tasks impossible to perform, shared a dormitory on the fourth floor. Through the barred, deeply recessed windows there was a view down onto the tops of the trees on the steeply sloping ground to the rear of the house. It was like looking upon a heaving sea. The mainland, it seemed to me, had already sunk below the horizon. A foghorn droned. Further and further out the ship plied its passage upon the waters. From the engine room came the steady throb of the turbines. Out in the corridor, stray passengers went past, some of them on the arm of a nurse. It took an eternity, on these slow-motion walks, for them to cross from one side of the doorway to the other. How strange it is, to be standing leaning against the current of time. The parquet floor shifted beneath my feet. A low murmuring, rustling, dragging, praying and moaning filled the room. Clara was sitting beside her grandmother, stroking her hand. The semolina was doled out. The foghorn sounded again. A little way further out in the green and hilly water landscape, another steamer passed. On the bridge, his legs astride and the ribbons on his cap flying, stood a mariner, signalling in semaphore with two colourful flags. Clara held her grandmother close as they parted, and promised to come again soon. But barely three weeks later Anna Goldsteiner, who in the end, to her own amazement, could no longer even remember the names of the three husbands she had survived, died of a slight cold. At times it does not take much. For weeks after we learned of her death I could not put out of my mind the blue, half-empty pack of Bad Ischl salt under the sink in her council flat in Lorenz Mandl Gasse and which she would never now be able to use up.⁴¹²

Sebald only indirectly refers to dementia here, but at the time of this book’s first publication dementia was still not a condition as well understood as at present, or as easy to openly discuss. Anna Goldsteiner is presented to us as someone defined not by who she had been or what she was still able to remember of her past but by some of what she had forgotten – namely, a general ability to function and, more specifically, the identities of people she would ordinarily have been able to easily recall. Sebald thus denies this character the possibility of stereoscopic depth that Wiskus identified in Proust’s pairings of younger and older selves which, she argues, allow for a full-bodied, coherent sense of a person’s life across time. As we’re informed that Anna Goldsteiner was surprised by her inability to name her husbands, we’re left to guess that she may still have been able to express herself in some way – how else would Sebald’s narrator know of her astonishment? – but, unlike Clara, Sebald doesn’t allow her any other kind of expression.

In a move that can be understood to be at once Proustian and anti-Proustian, Sebald uses involuntary memory in a way that suggests this can have debatable value. The banality of the packet of salt under Anna Goldsteiner’s former sink, the memory of which inexplicably and persistently imposes itself in the narrator’s consciousness following her unexpected (and equally banal) death from a “slight cold”, contrasts with Proust’s estimation of involuntary memory as providing depth and meaning: “Just as two photographs of the same scene, flat and out of phase, when viewed through a stereoscope, suddenly bind together in a vivid dimension, the disjunction between Marcel and the narrator coheres, at the end of the novel, as a single, rich understanding.”⁴¹³ Sebald seems to agree that memory retrieval can be involuntary but, unlike Proust, from there suggests this is no guarantee that memory thus retrieved will be significant, even to the person remembering it.

While the salt can also be linked to Sebald’s narrator’s imaginary “heaving sea”, what his memory of Anna Goldsteiner’s packet of it unexpectedly brought to my mind was Lot’s wife. This may not have been Sebald’s intention in Vertigo, but I subsequently discovered that in his previous work After Nature (1988)⁴¹⁴ he had gestured towards the biblical story. In this narrative poem, his mother was leaving Nuremberg when it was being bombed during WWII and saw it in flames, yet “cannot recall now / what the burning town looked like / or what her feelings were / at this sight,”⁴¹⁵ and Sebald links this unremembered event to a later encounter by him with “a painting / by Altdorfer depicting Lot / with his daughters.”⁴¹⁶ As a result of “see[ing] the world as she knows it destroyed,”⁴¹⁷ Sebald’s mother doesn’t become a pillar of salt, or have a “catatonic reaction,”⁴¹⁸ but her response to what can be understood as psychological trauma is memory loss – the ‘blanking out’ of a lived experience that Sebald later approaches indirectly by associating it with the symbolic representation of an old testament story in a painting.

In Vertigo, however, it seems that the recollection of Anna Goldsteiner’s salt packet presents Sebald’s narrator with an association of ideas whose significance can’t be accessed because his involuntary memory hasn’t also provided a comprehensible link between her person, her possession, and himself. Sebald doesn’t make explicit any connection between Anna Goldsteiner, her salt, and the story of Lot’s wife but, if my own association of ideas can be accepted as plausible, it suggests that Sebald has used his narrator to reinforce the notion, outlined above, that involuntary memory isn’t necessarily meaningful, and further imply that context is key to interpretation – to making sense of memories that may otherwise seem nonsensically random.

Sebald layers and blends discordant things over and into each other, and does this so seamlessly that we’re already immersed in troubled familiarity before we realise the text is moving the narrative in unexpected ways. Other than in the line I’ve emphasised – “How strange it is, to be standing leaning against the current of time.” – the entire passage takes place in the past tense and yet gives a jarring sense of being recalled in the present. Though the bars in the window could have served, as with Duchamp’s drawing in Stéréoscopie à la main, to break the perception of depth in the landscape beyond them, Sebald’s character projects himself through them nonetheless, and does so in a way that interweaves, in a stereoscopically hallucinatory manner, the ‘present’ recollected experience of mundanity in the moment of visiting Anna Goldsteiner, with a more dramatic, multisensory fantasy conjured by association of ideas – the swaying tops of trees viewed from above that remind the character of an ocean. In the simultaneity of these two conflicting experiences it’s the hallucination that is most vivid – much as, when looking at two non-stereoscopic images through a viewer, both can be seen overlapping but one seems more ‘real’ than the other. It’s almost as if, in the selected passage, Sebald’s narrator has an empathic ‘episode’ in which he experiences a little of what it might be like to be Anna Goldsteiner, an impression reinforced by the fact that, while he twice names her in full, like her he fails to identify the three husbands she could no longer remember.

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“the co-existence of two messages”⁴¹⁹

Although, like Proust, Sebald didn’t make direct use of stereoscopic imagery in his works, he is known to have been influenced by this form of photography, visually as well as in writing. Of 1950s Viewmaster reels, which he mentioned in several interviews as being “the original source of his later attraction to found photographic images,”⁴²⁰ he described the experience of looking at them as providing “an effect that is familiar from my childhood… You had the feeling that with your body you're still in your normal bourgeois reality. But with your eyes you are somewhere else.”⁴²¹ Lise Patt suggests that, in stereoscopy, “the indexical capture of place was traded for a phenomenological experience of being in place,”⁴²² a perceptual overlapping of experience that is slightly hallucinatory in that, as Sebald was aware, it can lead to feelings of being almost in two places at once.

Regardless of whether they are stereoscopic or not, Sebald has been recorded as saying, “I always have the feeling with photographs that they exert a pull on the viewer and in this entirely amazing (ungeheure) manner draw him out, so to speak, from the real world into an unreal world.”⁴²³ However, in his novels it’s the texts that are stereoscopic, not the accompanying images. The inserted photographs could be seen to operate in a similar way to Duchamp’s geometric drawings over stereoscopic photos, in that they interrupt the flow of narrative and impose imagery that disrupts the formation of mental imagery suggested by the text. The reader (of Sebald, or any other author) can be said to complete a text in their minds by visualising images and imagining other sensory and emotional stimuli alluded to in writing. Sebald’s two-dimensional, and often bland or enigmatic, photographic interventions draw the reader out of their imaginations and back to the page. This manipulation on the part of the author is of interest in that it can be said to give the reading experience another sense of depth – in the shift from the three-dimensional (or temporal four-dimensional) in the mind to the two dimensionality of the photograph and lettered sign on the flat page of the book, and back again, Sebald troubles our attention and perception, affecting our engagement with his work. Unlike Proust’s drawing together of past and present to suggest narrative significance in stereoscopic depth, the pairing that Sebald provides is that of texts with images that, together, act both with and against each other.

Given the sometimes hallucinatory content and writing style of his seemingly ‘unreliable narrators’, and observations I’ve made about involuntary memory in a particular passage of Vertigo, it’s additionally possible to see the inserted photographs as a directly visual imposition of unbidden recollection, especially in instances where the images and their placement in the texts have no obvious illustrative function. But their inclusion serves a particular purpose for Sebald, in that he was known to have certain reservations about the truth value of words, and saw the photographs as lending authority to them, in an abstract but still evidentiary way:

[W]e tend to believe in pictures more than we do in letters. Once you bring up a photograph in proof of something, then people generally tend to accept that, well, this must have been so.⁴²⁴

As Jon Sears puts it, “The images in Sebald's writings are a central feature of his exploration of the relations between memory and representation, explorations which exert a simultaneous 'documentary' insistence on the presence of meaning within the word, and a 'literary' assertion of the absence of meaning.”⁴²⁵ In addition to Sebald, there are many innovative authors who have variously used photographic imagery in their otherwise literary works – to name some that can be said to be significant: André Breton,⁴²⁶ Virginia Woolf,⁴²⁷ Annie Ernaux,⁴²⁸ Anne Carson,⁴²⁹ Leanne Shapton,⁴³⁰ and Mark Z. Danielewski.⁴³¹ But the artist I now wish to discuss, specifically in relation to presence and absence of meaning in combinations of image with text, is Sophie Calle.

Although recognising that, as a visual artist, Calle is also well known for her installations and filmmaking, the particular focus of this study is in a small selection of the many artists’ books she has produced throughout her career, as this aspect of her oeuvre is most relevant to the present research. Calle’s bibliography is extensive, and many of her publications have been considered. There are works that are time-based (Douleur Exquise⁴³²), that involve her making photographs in response to other people’s perceptions (Aveugles⁴³³), and that use investigative methods and photographs as evidence in attempts to apprehend and create composite ‘portraits’ of people she doesn’t know (Suite Vénitienne,⁴³⁴ The Address Book⁴³⁵). Some are particularly autobiographical, e.g. Douleur Exquise again, plus Rachel, Monique…⁴³⁶ and Les Histoires Vraies,⁴³⁷ to cite but three examples. With L'erouv de Jérusalem⁴³⁸ and Fantômes,⁴³⁹ she addresses the complexities of memory in the absence, or failing, of representation. This seam of absence in her works – of how to relate to people in their absence, of how absence affects memory – has been particularly fruitful to consider in relation to dementia and has partially influenced some of the books I’ve produced in my research.

Of relevance too is the fact that she has openly stated in interviews that much of her work relates to lostness. Of Suite Vénitienne, for example, she says, “At the beginning, I created these experiences [of following strangers] because I was lost.”⁴⁴⁰ Of En Finir,⁴⁴¹ a book that, somewhat ironically, successfully traces her failure to complete a specific piece of work in over a decade, she writes, “Je ne sais plus où j'en suis…”⁴⁴² Although Calle has stated that her work is “not about discovering anything,”⁴⁴³ in many of her projects she starts from a point of not-knowing and uses Oulipian constraints or rules-based methodologies, either self-imposed or set for her by others (for example, a collaboration with author Paul Auster which resulted in the box set Doubles-Jeux)⁴⁴⁴ to orient the creation of work. She has claimed that, to begin with at least, she used photography only as means of creating evidential documents to accompany text because “[w]riting is my main interest. I need a narrative within the type of work I do.”⁴⁴⁵ A conscious shift to a greater interest in photography occurred with Prenez Soin de Vous (2007).⁴⁴⁶ For this work, the text was written by the 107 women Calle invited to respond to a ‘Dear Jane’ email she’d received from a former lover, which led to her wondering what her part of authorship was – “If I hadn’t created the text, what did I do? Where did I stand?”⁴⁴⁷ – and as a result put more of herself into the photographic element of the work. However, in many of her projects the words of others (be they gathered in interviews or gleaned from found publications) have seemed to serve her as a base material or medium – another form of constraint – with which to construct works. This is also of interest in relation to my Atlas as I, too, have used ‘found’ materials, in both image and text, albeit not in precisely the same way as Calle. But it’s here that I wish to develop the discussion, begun with Sebald, of the ways in which image and text can work with and against each other.

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Benjamin suggested that texts help to “anchor… photographic meaning, offering it a constructed depth that rescues it from surface meaninglessness.”⁴⁵⁶ The specific kind of texts he had in mind here were captions – short, factual lines that disambiguate imagery by providing specific contextual information (such as ‘The Photographer Karl Dauthendey with his betrothed Miss Friedrich after their first attendance at church, 1857.’), and thus should tell us enough about what photographs are of to indicate what they are about and fix their meaning. In L’erouv de jérusalem the texts can initially be seen as ‘anchoring’ the photographs, in the sense that they invite us to read the images in relation to the specific memories they’re paired with. But despite the texts, what the photographs ultimately seem to evidence is their inability to represent what they are supposed to, such as spacial and temporal boundaries that are more conceptual than material – that are invisible – and the insubstantiality of lived experience in the tangible, durational world. The recorded memories fail to ‘people’ the photographs, and this impression of lack is reinforced by the fact that the images are, in all but one instance, of empty spaces. Like several of Calle’s other works, this book points to something we cannot see and yet, paradoxically, itself becomes a palpable, visible ‘proof’ of inaccessible absence.

Something different to Benjamin’s ‘anchoring’ may occur, however, when the texts paired with photographs are fiction: inversely to Benjamin, Sebald saw the photographs in his novels as lending factual plausibility to the stories they accompany. “The written word is not a true document, after all, the photograph is the true document par excellence. People let themselves be convinced by a photograph.”⁴⁵⁷ At the same time the images, inserted into fiction, can become ‘fragment[s] of a narrative”⁴⁵⁸ because they don’t necessarily need to be ‘true’ – the important thing, for Sebald, is that we perceive them to be so. But this can create tensions, as in the previously cited “simultaneous 'documentary' insistence on the presence of meaning within the word, and a 'literary' assertion of the absence of meaning”⁴⁵⁹ in Sebald’s use of image with text in his approaches to memory and representation.

“I have a tendency to use failure”⁴⁴⁸

In the introduction to L'erouv de Jérusalem, Calle explains what ‘l'erouv’ or eruv are. During the Jewish sabbath (from dusk on Friday to the first appearance of stars in the sky the following day) there are restrictions on what can be done outside of one’s home, such as what’s considered to be work – Calle lists as examples carrying objects like keys and books, and activities like pushing a pram.⁴⁴⁹ At these times, specially designated outdoor areas can be used in the same way as private or domestic spaces without breaking Talmudic law. Such areas are “symbolically enclosed by a wire boundary”⁴⁵⁰ which, in Calle’s book, are delineated by telephone cables outside the walls of old Jerusalem. These public spaces that can temporarily be considered private interested Calle, and she asked inhabitants, Israeli and Palestinian, to take her to places like this which, for them, had personal significance.⁴⁵¹ Fourteen of the memories collected in this way appear in text accompanied by black and white photos Calle made of the locations they were associated with. In only one of the photos can a person be clearly seen, but they aren’t significant to either the story their image is paired with or the composition of the photograph. All of the memories are anonymous; the reader can’t always be certain of the storyteller’s gender, age etc. Their anecdotes are gathered together in a central section of the book, sandwiched between typological series of images of the posts and wires that define the boundaries of the eruv – these images effectively surrounding, like an eruv, the private memories made public in the book.

As an object, this book is small and simple: 19 cm high x 10 cm wide, with seventy-two matte cream paperback pages perfect bound within a smooth soft cover. But the above described organisational structure is impressive in that the content is arranged to powerful effect. The central personal stories range from tales of childhood games, missed opportunities, loves unrequited and passions lost, to bad accidents and close escapes. Though the particular photographs accompanying these anecdotes seem more evocative than documentary because they’re beautifully composed, there is still the sense that they are supposed to serve as evidence – but evidence of what? As the images are enigmatic, like Benjamin I can’t help but search for signs – for ‘sparks of contingency’ – in the imagery that might provide extra context for the poignant texts. But though one trusts the images to be of the places where recalled past events occurred, there’s nothing of them that the viewer can discern. One tries to make a leap of imagination between the past moment of the event related from memory, and the past moment the accompanying image was made by Calle, to the present moment of our engagement with both in the book, and it’s impossible. What comes across instead is a sense of absence, in that the images fail to provide a bridge between the spaces depicted and the layers of time separating us from imperceptible memories of the human experiences of others.

Another work by Calle, Fantômes, becomes interesting to consider here as it too is about absence and memory. In its second edition, this book collects together two conceptually related works initially conceived for exhibition: Fantômes and Last Seen. ‘Fantômes’ is the name given to signs placed by spaces left on walls when galleries and museums remove artworks from display (in order to lend them to another institution, for example).⁴⁵² Last Seen begins with absent works famously stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston on 18th March 1990: in some cases the paintings only had been taken, leaving empty frames behind and, as Stewart Gardner’s will stipulated that her collection should remain exactly as displayed in her property during her lifetime, the spaces where the missing works once were had to be left empty. For both of these projects, Calle asked institutional staff members (curators, conservators, and other employees) to describe the absent artworks from memory. In the case of Fantômes, she also asked for sketches, and the collected texts and drawings were exhibited in the empty spaces left by missing works. For Last Seen she similarly collected descriptions, and photographed the places in museums where the stolen works had been, prints of which were framed for display. In each of these projects, the descriptions of the artworks were anonymised and presented as lists arranged in blocks of text.

Although all the people contributing memories should have been familiar with the paintings and other artefacts because they encountered them on a regular basis in their work, none could recall them in detail, and their descriptions are very varied, sometimes quite dramatically so. For example, one person’s description of Magritte’s 1926 painting L’Assassin menacé⁴⁵³ is of “clothed men standing around a woman who’s not only nude but dead, as if she was a sacrifice in the middle of the room,”⁴⁵⁴ while another said “There’s a body. I believe it’s male. It’s just flat. I don’t think there’s any woman in the painting, although there is some strange feeling of rape.”⁴⁵⁵ And though Calle’s ‘witnesses’ are talking about the same objects as each other, the inconsistency of their accounts points to a failure of memory, individual and collective. Singly and cumulatively, their descriptions do nothing to help us imagine or remember what the unseen artworks were/are like – in fact, considered together, they are even less helpful as guides to mentally picturing the works described than single accounts as, conjoined, they cacophonously contradict each other. In the absurdity of this there is something amusing, yet it points not just to failures of memory and perception but also to the limitations of words to speak about, or for – to represent – the visual, which by extension raises questions about the value of writings about art (of which this thesis is, admittedly, now part). In L’erouv de Jérusalem, Calle’s photographs serve as ‘fantômes’ for lived experiences reconstructed as written memories, whereas in Fantômes it’s the written memories that serve as placeholders for absent imagery – or they endeavour to serve these purposes, but fail to do so in interesting ways. In both cases, Calle’s attempts to represent absences in image and text tend to make their lack even more keenly felt.

Clearly, then, images and texts paired can work in multiple ways; photographs can be, or seem to be, contextualised by the words that accompany them, as Benjamin forwarded, and also, as Sebald preferred, be seen to ‘anchor’ the texts instead. An interesting aspect of Calle’s works is that she arguably tries to make use of both of these possibilities and, in the process, raises doubts about the assumed stabilities of image/text relations (amongst other things). The projects under discussion can be understood in terms of “seeing what happens when two equal and autonomous media, photograph and written text, come together in dialogue,”⁴⁶⁰ and though Calle has, as previously cited, expressed greater preference for text than image, her approach to it is quite photographic. In the chapter of this thesis on photography, I discussed the process of making images as transformative, in that the camera takes whatever is before it and translates this into a two-dimensional and purely visual representation. In Calle’s L’erouv de Jérusalem and Fantômes real things, once seen and experienced by people but since disappeared from view, are metamorphosed into words. Though the end results of photographing and writing processes differ, in each instance there is the transition of one thing into another form. In a sense, Calle’s works demonstrate that, like photographs, text and memory are also not accurate or reliable reflections of referents (meaning the thing depicted, described or recalled) but something other that can only gesture towards sources, more or less imperfectly. They become differently equivalent, or analogous, representations.

Unlike Sebald, Calle collects and collages texts rather than fictionalise them: “I don’t have the ability to invent. I can invent an idée but I can’t invent a situation. I have to look at it, use it as material.”⁴⁶¹ In the two books of hers discussed, however, it can be said that she relies on her participants to fictionalise for her as, scientifically, memories are understood to be reconstructions in that “retrieval of memories does not occur in some completely accurate form… but rather that recollection of memories involves a process of trying to reconstruct past events. In fact, systematic errors in memory [recall] are the primary evidence for its reconstructive nature.”⁴⁶² Calle’s participants help to illustrate this almost perfectly, calling into question the representational value of memories and the words we use to describe them. Any assumption that memory can make absence present seems undermined not only by the conflicting accounts of missing artworks but also by Calle’s photographs, in Last Seen, of empty painting frames. The authority or grounding that Benjamin thought text lends to the photographic, and that Sebald thought photographs afford texts, is complicated by the works of Calle I’ve discussed because it isn’t really situated in either. Although the descriptions of artworks in Fantômes are inconsistent with each other, there is still a sense that, while not accurate, they are people’s genuine responses to Calle’s brief – that they are authentic. But their authority as texts, paired with that of Calle’s images, is largely centred in the seeming matter-of-factness of her rigorous, ritualistic and semi-anthropological approach to both image and text as materials generated by ideas, and in the contexts – as installations in cultural settings, and as book objects – where the resulting works are encountered.

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“And now I am nothing, just a nothing with nothing. So real, so true, yes”⁴⁶³

Prior to beginning work on the Atlas I didn’t consider text, especially creative writing, to be part of my practice. Words did appear in my work at times, but they tended to be embedded in the photographs – such as portraits of people whose sloganed T-shirts captioned their images for me. But the decision not to photograph people in this research, coupled nonetheless with the desire to ‘put people in the picture’, obliged me to consider how I could use text with image in a more proactive way.

Although I’m confident I would have produced my Atlas regardless, had it not been for the pandemic I would, like Calle, have collected firsthand the words to inspire and apply in my work. The images I paired these with would likely also have been different as a result. Researching at distance has, instead, obliged me to seek reliable secondhand sources, and be creative in my responses to what I found. During this process I gave a great deal of thought to certain kinds of ‘equivalence’ and authority with respect to how images and text work with and against each other, as I was aware that the semi-fictional nature of the Atlas would benefit from this. By ‘borrowing’ academic styles of writing, some of the texts I produced can seem to possess their own scientific authority regardless of any imagery they’re paired with, and this then became a ‘base layer’ whose reassuring familiarity could be troubled or undermined by merging into them unexpected text elements in contrasting tones. Although this strategy began intuitively, study of Sebald later reinforced my understanding of the effectiveness of this blending approach. At the outset I realised that pairing medical photographs with unrelated text alters how the imagery can be read, and this entire book work originated in this observation. But I also wondered if some of the scientific images I wanted to use, such as those drawn from the Edinburgh Atlas, might similarly confer some of their authority as ‘objective’ seeming documents to other photographs in the book, as well as to texts. As one person I showed an early draft to asked if the preserve jar images contained a brain, when it in fact had a cauliflower inside, the answer to my question seems to be yes, though the fragments of various texts about neuroanatomy seeded through the work will likely also have influenced this pleasingly unexpected misperception.

Some of the images I’ve used are almost comfortingly illustrative in that, on first impression, they and the texts they’re paired with seem to align; stereo photos of a clouded sky hovering over prose which begins with the history of meteorology, is one example of what I mean by this. In other cases it’s not immediately obvious why the images are there; for example, the stereo photos of an elephant behind bars that accompany mock crossword clues and a fictional text related to aphasia, that also nods to Beckett’s multilingualism and his last poem Comment Dire. In this instance, the images don’t help us to guess what the text will be about, and we may understand them differently after reading the text – and even then, the photographs can be seen as visual metaphors, gesturing towards something not directly alluded to in the writing. The varied styles of image and text working differently throughout the book provide a variety of textures to the reading experience. The intention was that there should be no evident hierarchy of authority, an impression further reinforced by the fact that the pages of left and right book can function independently of each other.

Like Calle, I’ve used the anonymised words of real people as an authentic material – in my case the words of people living with dementia, such as the “So real, so true, yes” in the title of this subchapter – but I’ve not applied any rules-based strategy to their collection and usage. Instead, and similarly to the surreal or stereoscopic dissonances in Sebald’s layerings of multiple perspectives, they are sometimes blended into other texts, such as the blurring of ‘kitchen cupboards’ and ‘scrambled porridge’ into an anatomical description of the brain. I’ve also hinted at ways of interpreting the images texts like these are paired with, e.g. the possibility of seeing links between the numbers embedded in certain photographs and the numbered legends below these, and accordingly reading something into them that, while it can’t be seen, can perhaps be imagined. This is one of the means by which I believe I’ve managed to evade (if partially) the kinds of absences or failings discussed in relation to the works of Calle’s I’ve forwarded. And another key way of sidestepping these is in the evocation of a specific – albeit fictional and fractional – named person.

The title for this book was conceived after I had drafted the first three pages of content. This was the point at which I realised that, as part of the ‘putting people in the picture’ aim that had underpinned the project from the start, and given the way my texts were forming, it might be a good idea to suggest at the outset, in the title, that the work as a whole could be about someone. As it had by then occurred to me that the work had the potential to draw together aspects of dementia as classified in different agnosias associated with it (as discussed in the chapter ‘Unknowing’), I considered a play on the term ‘agnosias’, in conjunction with the Edinburgh Atlas that was the original source of inspiration for this book work, and settled on The Stereoscopic Atlas of Agnes Osias as my title.

At several points during the creation of this book I tested it by forwarding it for feedback to a variety of people – artists (two of whom have backgrounds in dementia research as scientists), writers, designers, members of the public (one of whom a GP), both within and outside academia – and a large number (roughly 40% of those canvassed) admitted having Googled ‘Agnes Osias’ in an attempt to find out more about her: was she real or fictional? Did her life/work have some significance in relation to dementia, perhaps specifically of the Alzheimer’s kind? And so on. I believe this desire to know more, based on the assumption that Agnes Osias might be a real person, is indication of the successful creation of character in this work. The desire to know more also suggests that Agnes, though believable, is still interestingly elusive. In the texts, she ‘speaks’ in the first and third person, is also spoken of, around and over by other, unidentified characters, and these perspectives are not distinct – an interweaving further complicated as the pages to left and right can be read out of sequence. But this is also intended to reinforce the sense of character and cognitive fragmentation.

Early on in the writing process I realised that, by combining the scientific and domestic, I might unwittingly reinforce certain prejudicial stereotypes. In the texts are hints of Agnes as child, lover, spouse and parent, as a person who dances and desires, cooks and knits (or tries to), remembers (if indistinctly), and so on. There is, arguably, no good reason why the reader should assume a female character might not in addition be a professional, such as a scientist, or have been such prior to the onset of dementia, while in parallel also baking cakes, knitting jumpers and mothering children. But, in an attempt to quash any such misapprehension, towards the end of the work I give Agnes the title of Dr, the idea being that the perceptive reader might then understand that one or more of the scientifically themed fragments of texts preceding this could have been authored, or encountered in the course of her professional life, by my character. In this respect also, the materially fragmented aspect of this book, with its split pages, does more than just reflect the splintered nature of a projected experience of cognitive decline. It equally evinces the complexities of lives that cannot be categorised in neat, singular roles – be these cultural, social or professional etc – as in the course of our lives we can be many things, simultaneously and evolving over time. This layering of identity and experience, as temporal and disparate but enmeshed, is as valid for the person living with dementia as for the rest of us. Making Agnes a doctor should add depth to our sense of her as a character and person, and disrupt assumptions that she may ‘just’ have been a housewife.

The intuitive decision to end the Atlas with a rephotographed reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s 1503 portrait Mona Lisa, was initially a response to a line from an assisted dementia poetry collection: “My face. It’s gone.”⁴⁶⁴ But I eventually also traced it back to Malabou’s insistent questioning about appearance: “If we lose all relation to childhood and the past the moment we are formed by destruction, what do we look like?”⁴⁶⁵ Although, as previously discussed, she concludes that we “look like less than nothing”⁴⁶⁶ this is surely not the case, but I did find it very useful to think about. For instance, if we can easily, instantly recognise the Mona Lisa, even in a replica of the painting that has been literally defaced, and nonetheless see significance in it, is it really impossible to do likewise with living people, as Malabou seems to claim? Mona Lisa, both as a person and a painting, has been an object of intense speculation, from Freud seeing in the image da Vinci’s unfulfilled need for motherly attention,⁴⁶⁷ to neuropsychological attempts to analyse her gaze in relation to its “direction… and the affective expression of her eyes.”⁴⁶⁸ Is it not odd that so much curiosity and effort can be expended on the irresolvable enigma of a renaissance painting, while the question of what might be happening in and beyond the outward appearances of people living with dementia (even those we may have close personal connection to) remains inscrutable and unimaginable because the desire for answers is insufficiently addressed?

As a whole, the Atlas became the vehicle for consideration of several aspects of dementia (agnosias, clouded thoughts) rather than narrowly focussing on one alone, and in that sense it more accurately engages with the experiences of people with dementia in that they tend to live with multiple syndromes and intermittent symptoms at once. It also served as an exercise in bringing together very different perspectives on dementia – medico-scientific on the one hand and domestic/lived on the other. Further, this work can be seen as a creative version of my thesis, in that it draws together much of what I have learned and understood about dementia, and the many questions it has raised for me as a result. Such as, how are we capable of understanding forests as neural networks, and entities like bees and slime moulds as sentient, when we have such difficulty recognising the value in human experiences of cognitive decline?

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BOOK TWO: Last Seen

This work initially stemmed from feelings of frustration with a series of artists' books about lost property, encountered during my 2019 research placement at the British Library. In the same timeframe I was reading about archival principles in artistic practice, and also thinking about the unused, clear sections of dye sublimation ribbon collected together during my work with that material for PCU1.

All the lost property related artists' books I studied at the British Library were based on a formulaic typological format à la Christian Boltanski, in which objects photographed are presented in the same ways: pictures of all manner of objects, from dolls to suitcases to hats and so on, are printed either in grids or one image per page in small books, with the objects depicted scaled to fit the frame or page as if they were all the same size.⁴⁶⁹ While the absence of hierarchy inherent in this approach could have interesting potential, the overall effect seems to be a flattening or diminishing of the objects depicted, an impression of lack that didn’t inspire a desire to compensate in imagination (it’s also visually dull, especially when multiple artists are reusing the same strategy without interrogating it). From this, I began wondering if a change of scale and organisational principle might be a way to make new work around similar subject matter.

The relevance of the lost object to dementia is in the ‘unknowing’ that occurs in visual agnosia, the effect of which is that people “cannot recognise by sight objects that they would have previously known.”⁴⁷⁰ Additionally, the misplacement of objects for other reasons has been studied, identified in three symptomatic clinical subcategories: ‘lost and found’ (forgetting where things are or should normally be), ‘hidden away’ (hoarding), and ‘odd places’ (putting things in unusual locations). Instances of some people living with dementia losing things in the latter subtype has been well documented;⁴⁷¹ as a typical example, putting spectacles in a freezer.⁴⁷² These misplacement phenomena have been recorded in studies of people with various dementia types, including vascular, frontotemporal and Lewey Bodies/Parkinson’s, but it appears to be most prevalent in Alzheimer’s, and while it can happen at all stages of neurodegeneration, from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) onwards, occurrence increases significantly as conditions progress into severity.⁴⁷³

Last Seen is comprised of a series of photographs of items people tend to lose and misperceive – hearing aids, engagement rings, and so on. Originally, I hoped to photograph objects in a lost property office, but the pandemic made this impossible. Instead, I researched a list online and collected objects to photograph at home. Each item photographed is printed singly and centrally on 29.7cm x 31.4cm acetate at 1:1 scale (life sized). The advantage of acetate as a material is that no matter how transparent the sheets are separately, multiples piled together become opaque. Thus, in a book with lots of pages, the images at the back are concealed, while the transparency of small numbers of sheets together allow the content of several pages to be more or less visible at once, and the objects depicted, one on top of the other, also conceal each other – seem hidden in plain sight. This also fits the ‘familiar falling away… unfamiliar appearing’ theme central to my research and its questions concerning lostness and unknowing in dementia.

The text, comprised of just seven words – 'last', 'seen',⁴⁷⁴ 'used', 'held', 'worn', 'felt' and 'lost' respectively – originated in thoughts about how we lose things and how we try to recall where they may be. In the ‘lost and found’ sub-category of the study mentioned, people reported being able to “remember using something but can’t remember where they put it.”⁴⁷⁵ While we most often can't find items because we can't recall where precisely they were last seen, we often also can’t recall when they were last used, held, worn or felt, which are more embodied experiences of objects. As all of these words have four letters, and 'last' and 'lost' are so similar, I realised I could arrange them in the same way as the other contents of the book – each term on separate pages, one on top of the next, the words masking each other until their pages are turned.

I considered two possible organisational or archival principles that could be used to determine the order in which the images were sequenced. My first thought was to place the smallest items at the front, gradually leading through to the largest at the back. I then wondered if the objects could otherwise be arranged in terms of age and in reference to long and short term memory, e.g. things a person would have lost when young, such as a baby’s dummy, could be at the back of the book, while things lost when older, such as a hearing aid, could be at the front, or vice versa. I tested both of these options, ultimately preferring the first – partly because it means the larger items are more surprising to discover in this way as they are ‘hidden’ by much smaller objects, and partly because organisation by size disrupts any notion of chrono/logical order. The imposition of a sequential structure can imply coherence even where there may be none: "Books of lost objects, found texts, destroyed titles, remade photographs – all [gain] some value by using the book form, insisting on its familiar structure as a frame to the otherwise elusive meanings of these constructions."⁴⁷⁶ After Michel Foucault, Ernest van Alphen classifies dis/organisational principles like this as ‘heterotopia’, in that such can be seen as “a kind of disorder that suggests a possible order, but one that at the same time cannot be thought.”⁴⁷⁷

As with all the artists’ books I’ve produced, Last Seen was developed during the pandemic. In order to get feedback for it, I made an early dummy available to view in a video, as I couldn’t present it for critique in person or post out multiple copies. While the finished object does work as a book, I found the video version interesting in that this emphasises its ethereal qualities, with the objects depicted looming up from a confusion of forms and into brief clarity, then disappearing, as the pages are turned. The addition of ‘captured’ motion provides a further layer of perceptual instability to the photographs than the still images have alone.

The surrealist cross-dissolve effect discussed in relation to stereoscopy can also be seen to apply in this work through the layering of semi/transparent acetate, both in the book as object and the video of it, albeit differently in each of these forms. On the last page of the book is an image of a biscuit tin of the same type that Boltanski used and reused in many of his installations, such as Les archives de Christian Boltanski 1965-1988 (1989):⁴⁷⁸ Although in this example the tins are said to have held photographs and documents drawn from his archive,⁴⁷⁹ they could just as well have been empty given that their contents couldn’t be seen. But in Last Seen I had an opportunity make it appear as if my tin contained objects, by superposition, even though it was empty – a storage space which one might assume contains lost items one is looking for, but in which neither they nor anything else can actually be found. To trouble any impression of familiarity I used the tin’s outer edge to form a video mask, thus providing an abstract shape – in which the filmed images are concealed and gradually revealed – that only becomes recognisable towards the end of the video as the tin appears through the last remaining pages of the book. The decision to use video of the book then helped me to determine a way to display both together in my final exhibition.

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BOOK THREE: Cloud Complex

Although The Stereoscopic Atlas of Agnes Osias contains many and varied references to clouds and meteorology, I felt there was scope to develop this further and with greater specificity in a separate book object. Cloud Complex emerged from thoughts about how I might more materially suggest an experience of clouded thought than in the Atlas. Initially, I imagined enveloping content (texts and images) in increasing layers of paper such as glassine – a material I thought appropriate because it’s used in photo albums and for preserving printed artefacts in archives, but also because its semi-opacity could serve as another means of approaching the reveal/conceal strategies explored in PCUs 1 and 2, and in Last Seen. Two separate testings of this idea (using cheap tissue paper in lieu of glassine), conducted in 2019 and 2020, almost resulted in me abandoning it altogether; though it worked well in practice, the way it functioned didn’t help to suggest what precisely it could be used to express. Then, in 2021, while researching clouds and whiteout conditions for writings towards the Atlas, I came across two interesting publications that I realised could serve as starting points for Cloud Complex text: The Climatology of the Cold Regions: Northern Hemisphere II,⁴⁸⁰ and The International Atlas of Clouds and of States of the Sky.⁴⁸¹ The former was particularly helpful as the poor quality of photographic reproductions on one page in it⁴⁸² led me to completely rethink my earlier experiments, and overall both inspired the reconfiguration of my initial idea.

Firstly, both of these publications led me to wonder: when people describe having clouded thoughts (including fog, mist, haze etc), what kinds of clouds might they have in mind? In the meteorological reference publications I’d discovered, categorisations of different weather conditions vary immensely, with clouds defined as ‘ragged’, ‘feathered’, ‘wrinkled’, ‘veiled’ and more besides. This descriptive language seemed rich with possibility – something for me to play with as means of suggesting that there may be subtle variations to individual experiences of the ‘brain fog’ people living with dementia report – and a way to consider the ‘texture’ of those experiences in a different way. I also began to think more about fog and sea fret in relation to whiteout, drawing on memories of experiencing these in person – for example, how the colours of things are attenuated, and how details and distances diminish, as mists thicken.

Punctually throughout my research I made several attempts to photograph cauliflowers – as analogous, or as ‘equivalents’, to brains – for inclusion in work. The first involved gradually slicing one up, millimetre by millimetre, similar to the way brains are prepared as tissue samples in brain banks.⁴⁸³ For the Atlas, I also stereo photographed a small cauliflower immersed in water in a large preserve jar. Afterwards, I left it as it was, and several days later was surprised to notice that it had begun to exude a milky discharge into the water which gradually obscured it from view. From there I devised a means of reproducing this effect in a controlled manner: placing a cauliflower in a large fishbowl, I gradually added drops of milk to mimic the naturally occurring ‘clouding’ of water previously observed, and photographed each stage of the process. Having determined that the images were of interest, it took four further attempts to produce image series of a good enough quality for print. From there, I wasn’t sure how to make use of these pictures; I thought they were in need of text, but wasn’t at all sure what kind. Then, while going through The Climatology of the Cold Regions: Northern Hemisphere II, I came across the line: “As a result of the diffuse reflection and scattering [of light] from cloud and ground… all irregularities and crevasses at the snow surface are invisible; in the air it is akin to ‘flying in a bowl of milk’,”⁴⁸⁴ and realised my cauliflower images could accompany the text I was then preparing for Cloud Complex.

This text was formed using a cut-and-paste technique. I first went through the two meteorological publications mentioned, highlighting words and phrases I could link in mind with experiences of clouded thought in dementia. These were then typed up and printed, cut into strips and reordered in a sequence which seemed to have some flow. To improve that flow I then rewrote parts and made additions of my own (including quotes extracted from a poem by Emily Dickinson⁴⁸⁵ and a prose piece by Samuel Beckett,⁴⁸⁶ plus reference to Kant’s metaphoric island of clarity surrounded by obfuscating fog banks⁴⁸⁷). Further rewriting and reordering of the text (including the late addition of a short introduction in the form of ‘instructions’ for use of the book, laid out roughly in the shape of a cloud) occurred each time it was prepared for print – for two work-in-progress dummies, followed by the final book.

The writing process was also informed by a predetermined page layout design. The main text is arranged as single lines across several pages, with the lines gradually positioned lower and lower on these as the text progresses – the idea being that the lines suggests a horizon, bearing in mind that as fog rolls in and thickens it increasingly obscures what can be seen of immediate surroundings. To reinforce this hint at the text being a horizon I used ellipses extensively to link the wordings across the pages in a visually continuous way. What I had in mind, with both the ellipses and my choice of typeface (Courier) in capitals, was telegrams; a form of paper-based message transmission now obsolete but which seemed appropriate for the fragmented text I’d produced. I subsequently discovered that there exist precedents for the use of ellipses in the work of other authors (e.g. Samuel Beckett,⁴⁸⁸ and J. Bernlef⁴⁸⁹) who also used these as a device in their writings about dementia and neurological conditions. The text-as-horizon also helped me to determine the shape of the pages – a long thin landscape format to suggest a panoramic vista.

Glassine is difficult to print (other than with commercial laser or expensive direct-to-media printers) so I decided to try using inkjet printable tracing paper instead: a test dummy produced with this material confirmed that it worked well – and, in fact, was a better option in that it’s ‘milkier’ in colour than glassine. As I ended up having to make the prints myself for various reasons, and the size and format of my page designs is bespoke, I realised that trimming them one by one would make consistently clean, flush edges extremely difficult to achieve, if not impossible. But by deciding to tear each individual page to size by hand instead of cutting them, I turned an obstacle into an advantage as, in a book about clouds, the tears soften the page edges appropriately. Given the cloud and cold climate references in the text, the other materials to use then almost suggested themselves – ‘icy’ clear perspex as backing board, and semi-opaque silicon sheet for the cover, silicon being a substance that’s slightly clammy to the touch, and is another material that’s normally intended for domestic use. The book binding method I devised is not one I’ve come across in my research, but instead stems from familiarity with fishing line from its use in prior projects such as PCU1. The clearness of the line is intended to complement the perspex book backing, and the position of the binding also allows the ‘horizon’ text to emerge from the inner crease, suggesting a continuous flow of words like a stream of consciousness. As lines of text can be discerned through the tracing paper but not clearly read until the pages are turned, there is a ‘ghosting’ or misting effect that also provides an impression of depth.

The main text ends with “In the air it is akin to flying in a bowl of milk…”, the quote from the climatology book previously mentioned. Once this line has ‘fallen off’ the page, cauliflower images are gradually revealed as through cloud lifting or fog dispersing. This use of reveal/conceal is, again, of relevance to dementia, and to clouded thought in particular, in that people who experience this hazy feeling report that it ‘drifts’ in and out irregularly. Unlike the weather, there is no known way to accurately predict the onset or duration of episodes like these, and this is a key point of this artists’ book. As similar experiences began being reported by people with long Covid⁴⁹⁰ – and a comparable symptom, called ‘chemobrain’, is known as an occasional side effect of cancer treatment⁴⁹¹ – might the sciences begin to take more interest in this symptom as it occurs, for some, in dementia?

Of all the books I’ve produced, Cloud Complex is closest to certain works by Calle, at least in terms of the way found text is used as material. And although Cloud Complex is an artists’ book rather than another kind of photographic object, there are also links that can be made to the material conceal/reveal effects observed in Szapocznikow’s resin works, and to Chadwick’s use of ‘equivalents’. I’ve discussed this strategy in relation to the flowers used in her Wreaths to Pleasure (1992-1993), but it equally extends to other things, such as the meat in Enfleshings (1989) which she considered as providing “intimate encounters with equivalents for our bodies,”⁴⁹² and my use of a cauliflower as ‘stand in’ for a brain is with similar intention. I could, like Chadwick in Self Portrait (1991),⁴⁹³ have used a real brain – though of necessity this would have had to be animal rather than human. But the cauliflower is not just useful as a visual equivalent, it’s also a medically related metaphor⁴⁹⁴ that I drew on in the Atlas also and preferred to remain with for consistency.

Of course, clouds too are “placeholders… for another, unrepresentable object”⁴⁹⁵ – and in the context of this research the object is an otherwise indescribable aspect of lived experiences. Given the difficulties people with dementia can increasingly have with telling us what their experiences are like, is it not all the more important to pay attention to what they are able to say about these? Cloud Complex is a way of manifesting a specific symptom, an artists’ book as placeholder for subjective experience, and it represents just one possible approach to listening and creatively responding to evocative ‘fantômes’.

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COMPLETION IN EXHIBITION

The first lockdown of the pandemic was imposed in late March 2020, the week after I’d finished testing PCU2. It can be said that my research was interrupted at a crucial stage in its development, then, as instead of completing that work in exhibition the same year I had to wait until 2022, at which point the three artists’ books produced for PCU3 also needed to be shown. My final exhibition took place in the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle. The allotted gallery space was particularly ideal for displaying PCU2 in that it has a smooth suspended central ceiling at a good height (4.1m) for this piece’s secondary projection, and the lack of outside openings made it easier to direct and control lighting, despite some indirect glow spilling into the space from neighbouring galleries.

Displaying small artists’ books in such a large area required thought about spacial qualities and staging. Having decided to place three books on individual lecterns – one copy of Cloud Complex and two of the Atlas – past experience of working in theatres led to the decision to individually illuminate each of these, creating bright islands over and around them. This light had dramatic effect, drawing the eye to the lecterns and giving these greater presence in the gallery, while also making the books easier to read, but without negatively affecting video projections nearby. A third copy of the Atlas was displayed in a perspex cube hung from a wall, and the light illuminating this copy of the Atlas was identical to those clipped to the lecterns opposite it, but stepped away from the wall above it by means of a bespoke fitting. Finally, a plinth topped with a 40cm³ clear perspex case displayed Last Seen, which was lit by a video of the book’s pages being turned, projected onto frosted film on the back face of the cube. Though encasing this work in perspex placed it out of reach and rendered it inert, the video both illuminated and animated it, drawing the visitor’s eye in a similar way to the books on lecterns, and providing depth as the imagery appeared to float above and behind the flat, closed book in an almost three-dimensional manner.

PCU2 was the result of research not directly related to the artists’ book project, but in the exhibition there were links to be seen between the works nonetheless – via the clear perspex used in its construction and that in the display cases with books inside, and the video mirroring that of Last Seen on the other side of the gallery. These material and visual correspondences helped to create an impression of cohesion between all the exhibits and thus imbue the exhibition as a whole with coherence – the sense of being presented with a body of work even though the separate elements in it were different to each other. As a sculptural floor piece, PCU2 was set apart from the books however, occupying an entire corner of the gallery, with space for viewers to walk all the way around it. The video projecting upwards into the bottom of the washing machine window serving as a vessel, and onwards through this to the gallery ceiling, helped to give the work greater presence in the space too, despite the fact that the base was not an imposing size and largely transparent.

I didn’t consciously plan it that way, but the three copies of the Atlas included in the exhibition neatly triangulated the space; two copies of the Atlas on lecterns flanked the centrally placed Cloud Complex on one side of the room, with the ‘dummy’ version in its perspex display case across the gallery from them, positioned between PCU2 and Last Seen. This perspex case was intended to mirror that used for Last Seen, in the sense that it was an identical (if, at 33cm³, slightly smaller) display solution. All the lamps used had the same choices of setting – three different colour temperatures and ten intensities. I used the brightest and coldest options available, with the aim of creating an impression somewhere between the cosiness of a library reading room and the clinical cool of a surgical display in a museum – a nod to the medical/scientific references and images in the Atlas and Cloud Complex (with the archival tone further reinforced by the use of perspex cubes). Helpfully, as the temperature of light apparent through openings to adjacent gallery spaces was much warmer, this made the contrasting whiter light I’d selected for the lamps more distinct. The intention wasn’t to put people off engaging with the books but to hint that they might need to be treated with some respect, as I recalled being told by British Library curators that consultable display copies of books tend to be roughly treated in exhibitions: this tactic didn’t entirely work, as (for reasons unknown) someone attempted to pull all the pages of Cloud Complex out of their binding, but this was an isolated incident.

Although the encased Atlas was, like Last Seen, an object that visitors couldn’t touch, across the gallery from it copies were available for consultation. The reason for providing two such copies was due in part to the amount of text the Atlas contains, and also the time it can take for people’s eyes to adjust when looking at stereoscopic imagery through viewers – which were also provided, attached to the Atlas lecterns using the same adjustable gooseneck stems as for the lamps. Giving more than one person at a time opportunity to approach a work that might, if they wished, require lengthy engagement, was intended as a courtesy initially, and as means of making it more accessible. The inclusion, in addition, of a copy of the Atlas in a case allowed me to show an almost finished book as these are designed to be, with a stereoviewer integrated in the cover – because, as an object, it’s intended to be a standalone, autonomous artists’ book rather than fixed to lecterns in a gallery setting.

In my introduction to the photography chapter, I frame photography as a material, and suggest that this can be indirectly photographic but still arguably be considered as such, or at the very least be understood as being about the photographic and, as an example, I forwarded the video footage of Polaroid emulsions I produced for PCU2. To this can be added the video version of Last Seen that I produced for exhibition. Benjamin’s ability to reach rich understanding of one type of photographic material while observing it in a different form, by drawing on memory (visual, haptic) and imagination, helps to support the notion that the photographic and its materialities can have substance beyond palpable supports, however reliant on interpretation this may be, and this is something I have drawn on in all the works produced in my research, and considered in their display.

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