#6 - Neither Here nor There

I love talking about photography, but I spend relatively little time writing about it. I’m aware of how articulating your thoughts can clarify your ideas, and I’m inspired at the moment to try put down my thoughts a little more clearly.

I’ve been reading up on liminal spaces, which are places suggesting passage from one stage to the next. These are places where something might have just happened, or may happen in a moment’s time. Photographing liminal spaces is an effort to turn potential into an artifact, in that the potential of any given space to have, or have had an action is the central focus. The moment in that image will never change, though it suggests that something could have happened, or that it did.

The idea of liminal space in photography is a new one to me, and it hasn’t consciously informed the photos I take. Honestly, many of the examples of liminal spaces I saw in preparation for writing this looked sort of awful. The recurrence of a lo-fi aesthetic, haphazard framing and dubious exposure characterize much of this imagery. These effects are seemingly intended to stoke a general sense of the viewer’s nostalgia. In order to achieve this, many of these images have an eerie or ambiguous quality to them.

Images with people in them tend not to be considered liminal. The picture above is of a tunnel, which is quintessentially designed to be passed through. There is also a bridge, stairs and an opening in the fence; all three are artifacts of passage and of the intermediate state between here and there. Despite these allusions to liminality though, the figure walking by undermines the potential of something happening by being the thing that happens. Ironically, by occupying the middle space, the figure causes the image to lose its quality of seeming like a middle space.

The emptiness created by the absence of people in liminal spaces is what achieves that quality of ambiguity. We are reminded of another time that may be oddly familiar, as the emptiness of the image brushes up against the solitude of remembering. When I think of the moments of my childhood that these images work to conjure, though, like lying on my parents’ bed watching the curtains blow in Sunday sunlight; like the road over the fence behind my house that curved down and left and out of sight (and that I still dream about occasionally), these memories never seem absent of humanity, because I know I was always at the heart of them. Though no one was there to be witnessed, my recollections are anchored in my sense that I was there to be the witness. Photography of liminal spaces is complicated by the fact that, despite the absence of humanity, someone had to be there to take the picture.

Please leave a link below to any of your own images of liminal spaces, or if you know of any interesting work on the subject, point me in the right direction. I’d love to see it.