insight

When fiction blurs with reality…

4 Jan 2010 by Ben Roberts in Experience / Features Comments

A couple of weeks ago I picked up Robert Walker’s book “Colour is Power”. It’s an absolute snip on amazon at the moment, and while his super saturated colour street scenes may not be to everyone’s taste, I find his jumbled compositions quite compelling.

The thing that has stuck with me most about this book though isn’t the photographs, but a paragraph from the photographer’s introduction:

“many years ago while at a friend’s house, I was watching a film on television called Scott of the Antarctic. Outside, a fierce snowstorm raged. The TV set was positioned close to a window, which created an uncanny relationship between the snowy TV screen and the actual snow pelting the windowpane. In the movie, Scott and his crew trudged blindly through a blizzard to their demise. After the film, I left the apartment and headed home. To my surprise, all public transportation was halted because of the storm. I had to walk home five miles through an onslaught of sleet and snow. When I finally arrived, my feet were nearly frozen. Today, the blurring between the urban landscape and the mediascape increasingly typifies our world.”

As I read this paragraph, I was treated to an extremely vivid flashback from one of my first travelling experiences from 2000 – a surreal two days in Hong Kong.

Late in the evening on September 10th, 2000, I touched down into Hong Kong airport, my gateway to a month travelling in China. I passed through the gleaming new terminal, with its polished metal and glass in stark contrast to Heathrow just 15hrs earlier, and boarded an express train to Hong Kong island. It was raining heavily, and through the rain on the windows I could see the lights of residential skyscrapers clinging to the sides of the bays.

Eventually the train entered a long tunnel, and at the subterranean main terminus I changed onto a metro line that took me beneath the straits and into Tsim Sha Tsui. I climbed the stairs from the station to the street into a world of neon and torrential rain, the streets still busy with pedestrians and food stalls. I was instantly reminded of a scene from Bladerunner where Harrison Ford eats noodles from a street side cafe while rain pours down around him.

I didn’t have any accommodation reserved, but I knew that I wanted to stay in either Mirador or Chungking Mansions, both of them huge city blocks populated by tailors, guesthouses and restaurants. They’re well known for having the cheapest accommodation for travellers in Hong Kong.

image by Amanda Behney
image by Amanda Behney

I checked into a tiny hotel room deep inside Mirador Mansions. There was literally enough room to drop my backpack on the floor, fall onto a single bed, and squeeze past a tiny door into a shower/toilet area. There were no windows, and it was stifling hot. I had to sit on the toilet to use the shower. The whole unit seemed to have been created from a mould, and then stuck together with a few rivets. Somehow, the owners had managed to squeeze a tiny television into the top corner of the room at the end of the bed. I felt really claustrophobic and tired, but at the same time wired with energy from travelling and being in a new, strange environment. I stretched out as much as I could on the tiny bed, and switched on the TV.

I had to do a double take – without even changing channel, I realised I was watching the very scene from Bladerunner that I had thought about just 15 minutes previously as I stepped out of the tube station. For a few seconds I was perturbed and bewildered – for at that moment my life seemed to be mimicking a movie.

8 years later and the whole experience is still there in my memory in total clarity. Joel Meyerowitz (in “Creating a Sense Of Place“) wrote about how each time he pressed the shutter for a photograph, a lifetime’s worth of experience is imbued into the making of that image. For me, the “Hong Kong Bladerunner Experience” is a memory that flashes back regularly when I think about photographing, although I have never been able to put my finger on why that’s the case. I don’t think that this specific experience has had a profound influence on the way that I photograph, but I find it interesting how certain experiences and memories retain their clarity and take on a significance above and beyond the myriad of encounters and occurences that we experience through our lives.

Do you have a specific memory that stands out above and beyond others? Have you ever seen the boundaries between the real world and a fictional world become blurred?

  • i think it's a great move when travelling to a foreign place, to take literature directly related to the area instead of a tourist guidebook.

    i've done this a couple of times - in 2002 i did a road trip through LA, Vegas, San Francisco - my travelling library consisted of Armistead Maupin, Hunter S Thompson and John Steinbeck.

    then in 2004 when travelling through Vietnam and Cambodia, it was a selection of writing about the war era - François Ponchaud's book 'Cambodia: Year Zero' and 'In Retrospect' by Robert McNamara amongst others.

    Regrettably, I was a naive and inexperienced photographer at the time, (how I would love to repeat these journeys with the vision and ability that I have now) but reading these books while immersing myself in the culture of these countries enriched my experience no end.
  • bformhals
    About a month before November 4th, 2008 I decided I was going to leave Los Angeles after the election. It was a very strange time because there was this feeling in the air that was at once hopeful, but also very dark. The economy was tanking at the same time the Obama hope machine was gaining steam. I don't know why exactly for certain but those months felt like a very specific moment in history. And as I roamed around photographing I felt as if I were walking through history (the photos don't reflect this unfortunately). I would stand on Hollywood or Sunset Boulevard and just soak in the vibe. I imagined what it must have been like to be there in the late sixties.

    Long before that I'd been taking notes an a script I wanted to write about Los Angeles, but could never really get it down. But those last few months of roaming around LA before the election made such an impression on me that I knew I had the hook for my story. It was an odd feeling, literally living your life writing a movie in your head about that very period of time.

    It was difficult to photograph though, especially with no discernible subject matter. But at a certain point the photographs didn't really matter anymore. It was more about harnessing that vibe in the air. I don't think I'll ever forget it. The last day before I left LA I was walking along the boardwalk in Santa Monica and stumbled up on Gary Busey and some other musicians singing about change as someone filmed them. The next day I packed up my car and headed back to Minnesota, but those last few months will be etched in my brain forever.

    (I was listening to Person Pitch by Panda Bear daily as well. Seemed perfect for the mood.)
  • Having made several commercials in Hong Kong before he filmed Blade Runner, Ridley Scott had wanted to shoot the movie there but lacked the funds. Instead he famously instructed his designers to draw on the landscape of "Hong Kong on a very bad day" for his vision of the Los Angeles of 2019. A very interesting Wired magazine interview with Scott can be found here. I've just returned from several weeks shooting in Hong Kong myself, so this post is very appropriately timed. And having wandered through the Chungking and Mirador Mansions, I have to agree, there's definitely something very special about Hong Kong. For me, it was the close proximity of an incredibly dense urban environment (which I found more exhausting than London, New York, Tokyo or Shanghai) to stunning landscapes (peaks, bays, jungles).

    When I was a teenage computer nerd, I used to spend hours playing around with a program called Bryce, which used fractal geometry to render surrealistic images of coastlines, mountains and forests. A week ago, I found myself on a fog-shrouded morning standing on the High Island Reservoir in Hong Kong’s New Territories. To my left the restless ocean with islands disappearing into the mist, to the right an enormous man-made lake bounded on all sides by dark, brooding ranges. At this point, I experienced a Bryce Moment for the first time in my life: a realisation that the environment I had stumbled across more than closely resembled a virtual scene my youthful self had created on his home computer two decades ago.

    I don’t know if I managed to make any useful photographs, but the experience of that recognition made the rest of my day. Just prior to this, I had confided with some of my peers that such moments and memories were as important to me as the act of making photographs. That I cherished heading forth to explore a strange place for the first time almost as much as returning from it with successful photographs. To me, such episodes are a critical component for engaging with the world regardless of the ultimate end product: at the very least, akin to a wonderful night’s conversation with someone of the opposite sex whom you’ll never see again.
  • mdm
    Back to Scott, I have a copy (somewhere) of the documentary that shows the making-of the film if anyone's interested -- they tour all the sets used in LA. It's ironic that (as Hin says) the film was made in LA to look like Hong Kong that could be LA in the future, and that Ben had what felt like a quintessential Hong Kong experience only to have it echoed by a future LA.

    It's good ol' referential ping-pong!
  • mdm
    I had an experience similar to this, but it was less happenstance, more forced.

    I took W.S. Merwin's "The Folding Cliffs" on a trip to Kauai awhile ago. Like Hannah, it became a guidebook in a way, or at the least it was the only thing I remember having with me. The book weaves the history of the island, in verse, and I distinctly remember reading it while overlooking an area where a battle took place and experiencing something quite moving. That merging of place/time/art.

    Poetry's like that, I guess, but you could argue that civilwar re-enactments are on the same plate. (And maybe even a place like Lascaux?) Trying to eek as much air and living history out of a fixed landscape as possible. Now that I think of it, it doesn't have much to do with your post -- mine was an artist's truth (Merwin's) colliding with the modern truth of a historical place, rather than fiction/reality.

    Yours is closer to déjà vu!
  • James Hendrick
    In a sense that's the colliding of reality with reality--of a past reality with the present. It's in this same sense that Simon Norfolk speaks of how European cities are still arranged after the pattern of Roman roads that lie buried under their soil. The long-dead Roman Empire is imprinted cartographically upon our immediate physical environment, perhaps even down to the route we take to work each day. Norfolk describes this as the layering of histories upon place, and when you can occasionally feel that, it's a sensation a lot like the above-mentioned fiction-reality collisions, because the Roman Empire is, for most of us most of the time and along with history's other chapters, a fiction.

    One of my classes this term is an EFL reading class based on an English world history textbook, taught to grades six through eight. The problem for the students is that it's hard, from their vantage, for this stuff not to present as fiction, and history as fiction can make for very dull reading. There are occasional dramatic flourishes, sure. We were momentarily dipped into a Mario Puzo novel when the Abbasids claimed the helm of the Islamic empire and lured the former ruling families to a reconciliatory banquet, where the deposed were covered in blankets and slain with food still in their mouths. But mostly it's reading about how crusading Christian knights, knowing what God wanted, laid evaporative claims to the Holy Land while permanently capturing yoghurt and coffee.

    Which makes for dull fiction unless that's your breakfast as you're reading, and then you have a reality-reality collision. You realize that an ancient people's notions of God and provenance have come, quite accidentally, to shape your diet.

    I never liked history much as a student, so I came into the class appreciating that our material is not all that interesting on the page, particularly if you're so young that your memory goes back less than a decade and all trajectories seem linear because you're viewing such a small stitch of their domains, and you can't really feel time. Our only hope, I figured, was to look for connections between those ancient records and our modern, daily surroundings, allowing the vitality of the present to thereby bleed backwards into the pages. Now having read Ben's post, it seems what we're after is that sense of seeing Harrison Ford on TV as we sit in the real-world inspiration of his faux-future setting. Realities colliding.

    My most forceful experience of this was at a flamenco performance in Sevilla, Spain. I'd arrived during la Feria de abril purely by accident, never having heard of the event and coming through Sevilla on a whim, with no preparations made, so that I spent the first couple hours in the city puzzling at why all the hotels were full and why women were standing at bus stops in costume. A backpacker finally told me we were at the locus of the biggest festival on the Spanish calendar. The next night, I sat in a small room only a few strides from the stage and saw Spain's national champions dance flamenco. It was the first time I saw a flamenco performance.

    The suffusion of unfamiliarity and serendipity charged a sense of the present, but the music sounded sometimes middle-eastern, and the dancer's hand movements recalled Egyptian dances that a friend had studied a few months before. These elements, lingering imprints of other cultures, evoked a sense of deep history. Vibrating present collided with reverberating past. The room sat atop the pinprick tip of a needle whose length plunged through centuries.

    I bought a CD of flamenco music that night and spent the next day with it in my headphones, walking Sevilla as a time-traveller. Now, nearly four years later, our class is reading about the early Islamic expansion, in which the formerly divided Arab peoples, suddenly united in the 7th century CE under their own brand of monotheism, swept outward from Arabia in waves of conquest that washed Islamic culture up as far as the Pyrenees. I brought the Sevilla CD to class and played a track with a distinctly Spanish intro and a distinctly Arab outro, and asked the students why a modern recording of traditional Spanish music should bespeak such Arab influence. "The spread of Islam," they said, but as we sat listening to the echoes of 1,400 year-old history, I could see that realities had not collided for them.
  • Ben, this is such a fun thing to try to think about. I like what you bring up about Meyerowitz's idea that "a lifetime’s worth of experience is imbued into the making of that image." Certainly true, and the definition of our experience should include our massive amounts of inputs: music, film, books, pictures, art. Despite them not being in my bag, these are the things I carry around with me everyday and I often implant them on the world around me. Music for certain melds with my daily reality, all of these things put me in the frame of mind to make myself receptive to having an experience, outside of just going through the motions. I once spent a few weeks biking in southern France with only one novel about the region I was in. No music, hardly a camera, no internet or talking to folks back home. That book became the vessel in which I poured my lived reality. And as I rode I thought about the story as if I were riding through the backdrops. The indelible and intangible things we carry enliven our memory and our experience. Really nice post, thank you.
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