Lucy Smith
You’re sitting in a waiting room. Feel the rough fabric of your chair, the cool chrome of the arm rest, see the uneven fan of magazines on the table beside you. The waiting room is full of strangers. See the jittering leg, the fingers picking on the back of a hand, the baby waking up with a noise that sounds like a pigeon, a man who can’t stop gently clearing his throat. The strangers around you are talking, conversations overlapped, snatches of words bubbling up through the wash of chatter.
After talking with the BA graduating photographers and learning about their projects, it struck me that to take photographs you need more than just equipment and a sense of what makes an image pleasing to the eye. You need intense self-reflection, a belief that it is worth taking a closer look at what you’re capturing. The quest is to find a fresh image, that makes the viewer see something as if for the first time. Photographs expose a part of the photographers’ philosophies and values. Looking at them exposes our own. Image as language; most of the students told me they do not like using words – image is how they communicate. The conversation made me smile, because I suppose I am the opposite, trying to connect using only words on a page. A few students said that using photographs instead of words is a way to make people listen properly. I have been thinking about that ever since.
There are many reasons to take photographs. Some reasons the students shared with me:
To heal. To show people how you see. To bring you out as a person. Capturing life through your own lens. Self-exploration. Photographs are historically vital—memorising or preserving. The camera is a character in the story. A combination of many crafts and artforms. Escapism. Photography is its own rich language.
I’ve been thinking about the moment where we first look at a photograph, and our brain considers it against everything else we’ve ever seen and known. I’ve been thinking about the space to pause and look at new images; how it is a luxury, but also a necessity. How the important things might exist between knowing this and knowing that. In-between seeing an image and deciding we know what it means. In-between our daily tasks, when we can let a photograph change us. Or let it keep us in the in-between, bringing us more questions than answers.
When considering this liminality, two quotes came to mind:
“What if our real life is lived in the silences? The thoughts, and the in-between-the-thoughts, not what we manage to put into words?”
- Emma Neale [‘The Pink Jumpsuit’, The Spinoff, 29.03.20]
“What is the truth of our real time? It contains dreams, it contains spinning off, it contains misinterpretation, it contains memory.”
- Patti Smith [‘Podcast #82’, New York Public Library, 13.10.15]
What do you call that space in-between? Waiting room, the unknown. Is the ‘space between’ where all the important stuff actually happens?
In this collection of photographs there are multiple perspectives to take in. It is as if we are sitting in a waiting room (waiting for who knows what), overhearing snippets of conversation. All of them are worth hearing, and all of them make us lean in and strain to listen closer.
Consider culture as performance / the vacuum of a white studio / surveillance / uncontrollable daydreams; turning them into something else / what is the opposite of the male gaze? / sweating women, the clumps of hair at the back of the neck / beaded jewellery made by a grandmother / everyday misogyny: “I take a photo every time it happens” / a cacophony of thought / the idealised male body / landscapes scarred past recognition.
We take the time to listen to all these perspectives and, eventually, just as if our name has finally been called, we are compelled to reach for our own. What have we been awakened to? What didn’t we notice until now? These photographs talk to the in-between moments, the things left unsaid and unseen, filling in some gaps in our experiences of this world we may have missed. To come to these photographs, to wait and see what they bring us, is the joy of this collection.
The artist-researchers Wrights & Sites would refer to waiting rooms as ‘non-places’:
“We pass through these non-places like ships passing in the night; we don’t communicate; we don’t become attached.” But they urge us to “make the non-place into a place. Look for the particular that marks this space as lived.”
- Wrights & Sights [‘Place/Non-Place’, mis-guide.com]
What connects a room of total strangers? The act of waiting? The act of looking at the same photographs? Flicking through different copies of this same book; each experience different, but connected.
Let’s return to that collage of conversations, the threads running through this collection:
What does skin actually look like, up close? / time lapse / making by hand / invisible pain / the spectrum of emotion shared by rugby players / extreme beauty / looking under the bonnet / discarded things / shadows cast / consumed by undergrowth / our life’s milestones / a glowing globe / in a mirror, paint a smile.
Peel yourself away and take your time. Find space between the things on your to-do list and approach these images as if you have all the time in the world. Wait for them to reveal themselves properly. See what happens.
Waiting rooms can be places of anticipation, worry, unbearable limbo. Looking at photographs is often less troubling than this, but it is also true that some images can force us to confront parts of ourselves—complacency, ignorance, things we had taken for granted. Getting comfortable amongst these photographs is also getting comfortable with unknown places, unknown people, unknown ways of doing. Listening to very different voices, letting them shape you. These photographs create a space (a non-place?) where you can spend some time, discover something you didn’t know you needed. Room to think, room to wait, and appreciate what surfaces.
And you find yourself relaxing amongst the strangers, amongst their chatter. The baby is asleep again, the man clearing his throat has been called into another room. A woman slides a magazine out from under the fan of others on the table beside you. You realise you feel as if you know everyone around you. You have almost forgotten yourself, and what you’re doing here. It takes a moment to notice when someone calls out your name.
Guest Writer Biography
Lucy Smith is a writer and teacher based in Cardiff, originally from Lancashire. Her short fiction and creative non-fiction has been published by Reflex Press, Ad Hoc Fiction, Flash Frog, Arcade Campfa and Ink Sweat & Tears, among others. She has an MA in Creative Writing and has completed three writing residencies in Wales. Lucy also facilitates writing workshops in community spaces and art galleries, and collaborates with sound and visual artists.
Instagram: @lucysmithwriter
Website: lucysmithwriter.com
