Like a death mask, Andy Lock's images of Orchard Park persist as impressions of something now gone. Before the building was demolished Lock photographed the abandoned apartments, the images gaining a metaphysical haunting with his alchemical photo processing. Taking the images as slides, Lock projected them onto a wall painted with glow-in-the-dark paint, and then photographed the after-glow, the after-image that appeared on the wall.
Like an apparition summoned to a séance the photographs appear unearthly. The green of the glow in the dark paint is at once nostalgic and toxic. The phosphorescence is is reminiscent of a Christmas decoration I have which is generations old, and glows in the dark. This magical quality always seemed very sinister, as, so family mythology had it, the glowing surface was radioactive.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfEttyqqE4nLr76O8phzbvzyEbW0pHnsFWXa42wijaBS-x6388eaA2nSSxvEMN24kNG3o2c5kJePPWgpHUCM406r6Fqc90O7uJON8GrJIilXsy0q8wVa8z5ISY-GOxD0ezQPYmrcqmYQM/s400/andy+lock+orchard+park+vinyl+armchairs.jpg)
Andy Lock, 2003-04, Orchard Park series (Vinyl Armchairs)
If photography is, as Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the 1850s, "the mirror with a memory", then perhaps it is a mere skip from the specular to the spectral, of haunted reflections, the after-images of the after-life ....
2 comments:
"The mirror with a memory." Quite - lovely, thank you for the introduction to Andy Lock. Genuine ghost photography, perhaps.
Hope all is well,
Dylan
Thanks Dylan - yes I think definitely something authentically ghostly, perhaps 'hauntography'?
cheers, jacky
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