It started life as the borrowed remnants of a failed image, or what I refer to as one that “got away” from me, using the three shots of the same model – the mysterious men in black, backs to the camera looking at…something. The “what” is always the challenge. What are they looking at or what can I have them look at, since I can make it be almost anything I can imagine.
The scene I put them in is the low waters of the Salton Sea, a desolate place I visited earlier this year, I think specifically it was called “Bombay Beach.” This place was a literal ghost town – ruins of buildings and houses, abandoned cranes, dead birds decaying on the beach. Abandoned lives, really. I was very taken by these decaying moorings in the water – they are shot often by visiting photographers, and once I added some fog banks and a brilliant light in the center, the already sad and desolate place became all the more eerie to me.
My men standing in the shallow water looking around, again, at what?? I struggled with the “what” for a few days. There is no motion or flow in this water, so these men are motionless, waiting, idle…all clues for me – even the birds I added are flightless, perched on the moorings waiting as well.
This is where the art dictates itself and starts to tell you something about what’s going on in your own mind. These men are in stasis, in waiting, and there is nothing to wait for. There is nothing much to see and there is nothing much to do. All life is still, all life is frozen – in them, in the environment, in the birds. This is a place of nothingness, a place for waiting, a place where all activity ceases, or at least pauses. This is a purgatory of sorts.
Despite having more than enough creative outlets and endeavors to keep me busy, I sometimes feel like my life is idle, in waiting, gestating, a pause leading to more waiting. I feel sometimes I am always journeying and never arriving, and the journey is so slow.This is largely and likely due to the lack of fulfillment or fruition to my plans for living a creative life, a full time artist, a self-actualized being. I have all the components, but the machine I intended to build in my life is still largely unfinished. I am sure a lot of people feel this way, but I also feel this is the headspace of my depression which ebbs and flows from time to time. Lifelong companion, really, and not a welcome one. I feel it has limited my progress, and put me more or less here – in this low place depicted in this metaphorical image.
These men are not doppelgängers, not clones, these men are echoes of the same person. Slight though the space between them is, it shows a progression forward, but so little, so inconsequential. They have not even reached the moorings, and there are no boats waiting for them – just a brilliant but wan light, a slow fade to vaporous and amorphous horizon.
Nothing to see, and nothing to focus on.
In a way, this is a sequel or a companion piece to an image from last year, also about depression, called “the Pull of the Tidal King.” If I chose to reference that one, this would have been called “the Wake of the Tidal King” perhaps, but this is no wake, this is the eye of the storm, the restless, seemingly unending pause in between more nothingness. Is that brilliant light ahead a goal, a destination? Perhaps, but perhaps it is in the process of fading forever into the distance, perhaps it is pulling ahead, perhaps it is all to no avail that they look at it – indeed only one of the echoes appears to even notice it at all.
It’s not a happy image, but neither is it melodramatic. It is exactly what it should be, if art is to accurately convey the creator’s mood and headspace. It is empty and inert, it is almost devoid of substance, and it is, at least to me, maddeningly vague and non-specific. And it should be, for that is true to my intent. I have given these echoes no hopes, no goals, no plans and no motion. They are inertia personified, waiting for no one in the lowlands.
For my title, I chose, as I often do, a favorite song that sometimes attaches itself to the image in the days I am working on it. In this case, “In the Lowlands” by Crowded House, which contains the verse:
Ghost cars on the freeway Like friends that you thought you had One by one they are disappearing
Model: Ben
Sig Nordal 