Buying a house is a fairly good way to discover how often we arrive at things after their images.
Before setting foot inside, we have already seen the front, the kitchen, the bedrooms and the garden from angles someone chose for us. We know the floor area, have studied the plan and have probably argued about where to put a table we don’t own yet. Then we arrive, and the house doesn’t add up.
Sometimes it is much smaller. The photographer used a lens capable of turning a bedroom into a side chapel at Westminster Abbey. The garden has a slope that mysteriously didn’t exist online. The street noise wasn’t included either. And the kitchen that seemed flooded with natural light turns out to have a window the size of a toaster.
Sometimes the opposite happens. The house is better than the photographs. There is a relationship between two rooms that the listing couldn’t show. The light comes in well. A feeling of space appears that no wide-angle lens managed to understand.
The strange thing is that we don’t simply feel we are seeing the house. We are comparing it with a version we already knew.
As we walk through the rooms, something fairly invasive happens too. We start looking at the lives of the people who live there. The books, the sofa, the photographs, a bicycle in the hallway, a suspicious number of cushions. Within minutes, we think we know things about people we have never met. Then we begin erasing them. We mentally remove their furniture, change a colour, move a wall with the extraordinary ease of someone who hasn’t yet received a builder’s quote, and start putting our own lives inside.
The children could sleep here. The table would go there. This would be my desk.
Half an hour earlier, those rooms belonged to strangers. Now they contain a possible future for us.
The house has moved from reality to image, from image back to reality, and from there to a new image that exists only in our heads.
We do this all the time.
We arrive at restaurants after seeing the food, at hotels after touring the rooms with a finger, at cities after hundreds of photographs and, increasingly, at people after meeting some version of them on a screen. Even our own experiences begin to exist a little beforehand as images: what the trip, the house, the body, the life we hope to have will look like.
I don’t think this means images are deceiving us.
That would be too easy.
The photograph of the house was true. The kitchen was there. So was the garden. What the image did was much more ordinary and powerful: it chose a version.
That has been my job for much of my life.
You arrive on location and find too much world. There are people, objects, light, noise, mistakes, inconvenient walls and details with no intention of cooperating with the idea. Then we start deciding. From here. That face. Take this out. Wait for that light. Move that.
We reduce until something can travel.
That is part of what is beautiful about the craft. A complicated experience finds a form, an idea finds a body, and something that was difficult to explain can be understood in a second.
There is a risk, too.
When you learn to find the image quickly, you begin to find what you already know to look for quickly.
A worker becomes a pair of hands. A family, a table. A culture, certain colours, clothes and streets. A body, desire. Not because those associations are necessarily false, but because they work so well that they can begin replacing what they were meant to show.
That is where culture becomes most interesting to me.
Not as a list of references or something a creative invents during a presentation, but as everything people are already doing with the forms they have inherited. How they wear a trainer, alter a garment, occupy a street corner, stick a sticker over an expensive symbol, take something designed for one purpose and give it another.
The world is already speaking before we arrive.
Good work starts by looking at that.
Perhaps that is why the distance between an image and what it shows interests me so much. Not because I want to denounce it. An image has to reduce; that is precisely its power. An entire house can fit into ten photographs, a company into a symbol, a person into a portrait, and a war, for better or worse, can end up living for decades inside a single instant.
We need those forms. They help us remember, find our bearings, imagine and share things that would otherwise disappear or remain too far away.
The problem appears when the version starts giving the orders.
When the real house disappoints because it doesn’t match the photograph. When the body starts working to resemble its image. When a profile feels more coherent than the person. When a brand seems to contain the life it was merely lucky enough to accompany.
We live inside that negotiation.
Not between reality and lies, but between life and the forms we make so that we can see it.
At the end of a house viewing, I usually look at the front again.
It is no longer the photograph I saw that morning. Now I know where the corridor is, how the light comes in and which room was much smaller than it looked.
But it isn’t simply the house in front of me either.
I have already put something of my own inside.
A table that doesn’t exist yet. The children running. A desk. A possible life.
Perhaps I will never go inside again.
It doesn’t matter.
The image has already done something.
This is where Battery begins.