Sunshine and Cataclysms
Yoann Lemoine (who I found on BOOOOOOOM!, a site I should visit more often) makes images, takes photographs, that I would love to put all over my walls. This image seems pulled from some near-future science fiction tale (is it a utopia transforming into a dystopia, or vice versa?), or perhaps from a novel by J. G. Ballard (Cocaine Nights came to mind first, because I vividly recall the sunlight in that book, but Super-Cannes , with its heat, its concrete, and its glass-walled offices, is perhaps a better fit):
Many of Lemoine’s photographs evoke, for me, the end of the world (or could it be the edge of the world, the fringe: world’s-end?); even the photograph on her site of the singers — a choir, I think — feels ominous, somehow. She is photographing in the present, visualising the future; and the futures artists visualise are always conditioned by how they interpret the present. I would like to know more about Lemoine, about her philosophy, her hopes, her fears.
This photograph certainly suggests a journey towards closure, a trip to the edge of somewhere, something:
And when I saw this photograph my first association, strangely, was On the Beach, (a purely arbitrary association, a connection of “sand” and “beach”, as I’ve not actually read Shute’s novel):
My second association was The Quiet Earth, the opening scene of which feature (if my memory is correct) a beach, and waves. A cataclysm has occurred, and only a few people have survived. There is heat (a very Ballardian heat, now I think about it) and loneliness, the narrative tracking a survivor’s exploration of his newly barren world. Lemoine’s photographs do not always depict a barren world, but they do hint at approaching cataclyms.
(On the subject of films about the end of the world, Knowing, the latest film by Alex Proyas, director of the exquisite Dark City, is a mighty thing, and I can’t understand why it didn’t receive better reviews when it was first released. Well, I can, in a way, but still: what flaws it may have are greatly outweighed by its ambition, its ideas. If you get the chance, watch it: it is all that good science fiction films should be, but so frequently are not.)