Phil Taylor
Brighton, UK (November 2009)
‘Memoriafutura’ contribution
Introduction:
My work (photography) was recently critiqued for an exhibition catalogue; the text that follows is an extract from an introductory essay by Joanna Lowry. I believe this text answers the question ‘Why should these images survive the test of time?’ My photographs reach back to the past, are drawn in the present and will continue to speak their language in the future, as Joanna Lowry writes, my work is “a kind of collective imaginary dreamworld” that cannot be locked into the present.
“Secondary Revision: Tracking the Dream
Secondary Revision is the term used by Freud to describe the process through which we narrate our dreams. Our dreams themselves, as they are experienced in the moment of dreaming, have a phenomenal presence that is not yet articulated in words yet in narrating them, however formless and inconsequential the form that that narration might take, we begin to impose ourselves upon them. Our conscious minds enact an initial process of censorship upon the dream form, moulding it into a shape that can be articulated and shared, and betraying, even in that moment of articulation, the struggle between our unconscious desires and the conscious mind. The irony is that it is only through secondary revision that we gain access to the dream, as soon as we attempt to remember it, to re-think it, we change it and it slips from our grasp. The dream is thus always an elusive presence deflected through the prism of a language that destroys it at the very moment of articulation.
The work of Phil Taylor shares something of the structure of this process of secondary revision if only because the subject matter that he deals with is itself a kind of collective imaginary dreamworld. All his work, whether located in the touristic dream heavens of the British seaside town, the dislocated histories of Berlin, the immigrant gateway of the ports of Marseilles, or the desolate ex-mining towns of Western America, engages with the relationship between the impoverished reality of the lived environment and the fantasies that hold it in place. The town of Butte, USA, originating in the nineteenth century as a copper mining town and now a mere shadow of its former self, is haunted by its lost history, and by the memories of a mythical frontier way of life centred around the freedom of the individual and a disrespect for the federal state. The wild expanses of the landscape stand as a symbol for a masculine identity that finds its apogee in figure of the cowboy and hunter, spending his days out on plains and mountains, driving some beat-up truck across the highways, and spending his nights drinking and gambling in the bars of the town. (Joanna Lowry, October 2009)”
Images:
All images (x 3) are taken from the series ‘The Last Best Place – photographs from the American West’ 2009.
Phil Taylor ©2009 / Studio Hotel Vitrine (www.hotelvitrine.com)
Phil Taylor