Stop!

The Looking Glass - Synopsis

Lewis Carroll's famous tome Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland creates a physical and mental removal from reality by creating a fantastical world of adventure in the mind of a young girl. Hugh Haughton’s introduction to Lewis Carroll’s works (2009 ed.) surmises that “To read the Alice books is to plunge into a world of narrative distortions and nonsensical explanations, and the reader is perpetually caught between two contradictory positions…”(pg.x). While that may be seen as a casual synopsis of the work itself, I chose to see it as a distorted view of the human subconscious, mainly our dreams. Dreams can basically be lost memories, past events and even fantasies that we relive during our unconscious hours of the day.

Perhaps Lewis Carroll describes the nature of dreams best. He contemplates the definition of insanity by saying, "... May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which is the sleeping life?" (Moses, 2009) I chose to take his words and interpret them into a photography project. I liked the concept of blurring the distinctions between fantasy and reality through the effective medium of photography. I found it amusingly ironic to use a documentary piece of equipment to capture the unreal.

In his work, L’imaginaire, Sartre analysed 3 representations of a dead friend; one mental memory, one photograph and one caricature. He explains that it’s actually the caricature that can “give back” his friend more accurately than an exact (but lifeless) likeness, even though it only concentrates on a few expressive features. Using this, I decided to choose to create a few of the main characters drawing upon the Disney version of Carroll’s tale, rather than mimicking the illustrations from the book itself. I felt that not only gave justice to the detached nature of the story, but also gave my images a sense of familiarity for the viewer.

While I am using the book of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as my inspiration I’m not re-enacting the storyline but in fact re-imagining it. I want to take the focus away from Alice in order to give visual dominance to not just a different character, but also to the meaning and metaphor behind each image. Although Alice is arguably a metaphor herself, I feel that the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat provide a much deeper meaning to Carroll’s writings, as through the madness and confusion, they provide much more insight than other characters. The Mad Hatter embraces his mental state giving him a sense of clarity above everyone else, which I think mirrors the old saying “In the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king.” (quoted in Erasmus' "Adagia," in 1536). I decided to use a human model instead of a pixel based figurine to portray the Mad Hatter in order to give the character much more emphasis and dominance, inspired by a Vogue fashion spread by Annie Leibovitz.

(Photograph by Annie Leibovitz, Featured in US Vogue December 2003 issue - found at http://www.vogue.com/feature/120103/popup/slideshow4.html)

However after my first photo shoot I decided to introduce the Cheshire Cat to further disrupt this hierarchy of my making. I found it oddly satirical that a creature generally considered nothing more than a household pet can be so sly, cunning and subversive, which is why I chose to create a Cheshire Cat figure as opposed to using a human model again to imitate the furtive nature of the character. He is part of Wonderland, but no one notices his importance. I felt that within the context of the story the Cheshire Cat was actually the superior opposite of the Mad Hatter, in that he himself has a clear and intelligent mind but has embraced the insanity he is surrounded by, giving him an advantage. Even Alice is slightly frightened by him when they first meet: “The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.”(pg.50) Carroll immediately states the dark and intimidating features of the Cheshire Cat, suggesting that he may have a slightly predatory nature which I decided to mirror in many of my images.

(Alice first meets the Chesire Cat – illustration by John Tenniel, published in 1898 by Macmillan & Co, LTD)

I then later decided to also create the Queen of Hearts. I wanted to introduce her to further upset the original dynamic of the character hierarchy. Ironically I felt that she was necessary to create purely because she needed to be depicted as unimportant. Upon seeing the Queen and her effect on her subject Alice remarks that “what would be the use of a procession if people had all to lie down on their faces, so they couldn’t see it?” And so she stands up and makes a conscious decision to defy her. I thought this would be an interesting side-line to explore in some of my photographs, the idea of Alice actually attaining a slight bit of dominance over the Queen.

I had to put a lot of thought into where to set my story, I originally wanted to scout slightly decrepit, run down and haunting areas in order to draw a dark parallel between Bradford and Carroll’s Wonderland. However I decided to make a slightly more positive statement by finding more visually stimulating places that where quite detached from the status quo of Bradford. I wanted to seek out nature most importantly. Green. Again Sartre’s writing gave me pause for thought; He wrote about the redundancy of comparing the ‘beauty’ of one natural spectacle against other because beauty is only apparent when imagined “but the imagination remains at a remove from reality” He digresses to explain that “Reality is never beautiful. Beauty is a value that can only apply to imaginary productions and which implies a complete annihilation of the world in its essential structure.” The physical cannot compete with the unreality of a visual and aesthetic experience. Therefore I decided to choose locations that left the idea of ‘beauty’ open to interpretation; a monument surrounded by imposing buildings, a park with cold stone instalments, a dead garden covered in snow, an overgrown ill kept garden that had emotional significance. I want people to look at my images and not be able decide where the beauty lies, but know that it’s inherent. As Salvador Dali once said: “To gaze is to think.” (Ross, 2003)

The idea of fantasy vs. reality is something that I feel ties in well with the work of surrealist artist such as Yves Tanguy, Jean Arp and of course, Dali. I’ve never considered myself a fan of Dali; I found his pieces to be plagiarised versions of Tanguy in terms of composition and Joan Miró in terms of colour and materials. However I’ve always been fascinated with his mind and experimentation with the subconscious. He was greatly influenced by the writings of André Breton and Paul Eluard (considered the founding poets of Surrealism), who were in fact friends of Miró and Arp and obsessed with trying to discover how their unconscious minds could express themselves through writing (Ross, pg.40). They tried tests such as Automatic writing, which is what Dali later experimented with in order to give some permanent form to the subconscious. I liked the idea of translating this into my project; to photograph an aspect of the subconscious. I feel that melted well with Carroll’s writings in terms of Alice’s dreaming life becoming a part of her reality.

Dali (and Tanguy by proxy) also inspired me in terms of compositional style. The idea of deceptive and hidden images – leading to multiple interpretations again mirrored Carroll’s work perfectly. I decided to place my models in awkward places to highlight not only their re-imagined personalities, but also their inability

(Cottingley fairies taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffith in 1917)

to ‘wake up’ and reverse their roles. I was also greatly inspired by the local phenomenon of The Cottingley Fairies from 1917. Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths’ ingenuity and artistic farsightedness is another huge stimulation to my work. They fooled a generation of people and even inspired the legendary Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I loved their ingenuity and creativity, I feel they made a valid statement about the reality we all seem to live in; seeing is believing. We deny the existence of a great deal of things until it’s something we can either experience ourselves or somehow document. As for my images you don’t have to believe, just see – really see.

Originally I wanted to capture everything through a fisheye lens and a phone camera to not only imitate a ‘Looking Glass’ but to also suggest the duality of the story. However I decided to use a variety of different equipment as I realised that it not only gave me a strong variety of different effects, but also suited my original intentions much better. This gave me more freedom to explore the more artistic nature of experimental photography for my final piece. I wanted to experiment with Lomography because the dissimilar and disjointed nature of this, almost cult practice, fits in perfectly with not only Alice’s adventures in wonderland but also my focus of converging the idea of reality and dream life. Lomography has become an international phenomenon in regards to it’s experimental visual expression, coupled with its combination of lo-tech and hi-tech approach. The mixture of deep, saturated colours contrasted with black and white images with closeness to the subject made it a fascinating technique to try.

The further I went with this project, the more difficult it became for me to stick to a single storyline. I later decided to experiment with a child model juxtaposed with the Disney-esque plastic figure to further highlight the contrast between reality and fantasy. I used my dark haired, brown eyed, tanned skinned niece, dressed her in an Alice costume and simply asked her to react to the figure. I’d intended it be slightly cutesy and comical, however her reactions were so dark, serious and almost sinister it gave me a whole new angle on my story-line. It began to piece itself together as a dark voyage not unlike Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Just like Dali & Carroll, I want my finished piece to be a work of parallels. Within Alice in Wonderland there’s a prominent tale about a journey of emerging from childhood and plunging into adulthood, running alongside a slight on the effect of the Victorian education system against a child’s imagination.

What I wanted to depict most of all, was illusion. Whether it be fantasy, dreams or simply reality – I feel that is exactly what illusion is. Illusions that we all live under. I wanted to show that what we think IS… ISN’T.

	The Illusion that you’re trapped and can’t escape.	The Illusion that the grass is greener on the other side.
The Illusion of who you can and cannot trust.			The Illusion of who you are and who you’re meant to be
	The Illusion of your own reflection	The Illusion that you’re in charge

Bibliography

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Penguin Books, 2009 (First ed. Published in 1865)

Rabaté, Jean-Michel. Writing the Image After Roland Barthes. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997

Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’imaginaire: Psychologie Phenomenologique. Paris: Gallimard, 1986

Moses, Belle. Lewis Carroll in Wonderland and at Home: The Story of His Life. BiblioBazaar, LLC, 2009

Fanés, Fèlix. Salvador Dalí: the construction of the image, 1925-1930. Yale University Press, 2007

Ross, Michael Elsohn. Salvador Dalí and the surrealists: their lives and ideas : 21 activities. Chicago Review Press, 2003