In 2007, Creative Freelance, a group of Suffolk artists, illustrators, copywriters and designers, published a comic book called ‘He Opened his Eyes’. Each of us had two pages to illustrate part of a story written by one of our members. The book can be bought online from Lulu.com.
My contribution was a pair of photo-montages. They’re about looking over someone’s shoulder. The meaning of “when he got back, he couldn’t believe what had happened” is ambiguous. We don’t know what’s happened, or what preceded whatever’s happened. Maybe something’s different about the place he got back to. Maybe there’s no physical evidence for what’s happened, because the sentence refers to something that happened before he got back, or a change in a relationship with another, unseen person. It’s up to you to imagine what happened.
The figure is a friend wearing his characteristic mac and flat cap. I asked him to pause as he was leaving and photographed him from behind. The interior is my home, when the late afternoon sun cast dark shadows. There’s surf lapping at his feet. The exterior is a church window. The scale of the insects has been altered. The man is unaware of a large beetle on his back; he wouldn’t see it even if he turned around. Where did it come from? Was it waiting for him? In the second montage, it’s dark outside. Moths come out at night.