This picture is part of a series of 85 black and white
photographs of London. Entitled “Unreal City”, this photographic series was
inspired by T.S. Eliot’s famous poem “The Waste Land”. In Eliot’s poem London
is the “Unreal City” in which most of the characters in the poem have their
entrances and exits. The photographs reflect many of the themes of the poem: a
strong sense of alienation; people’s inability to connect meaningfully; the cruel
demands of the city; the failure of religion to provide comfort in this broken
world; and the apparently unbridgeable divide between rich and poor. The dark
humour which is evident in several of the pictures emphasizes the “unreality”
of life in the capital, but also holds out a few rays of hope that all may not
be lost.
In this picture the path leading to the station in a
commuter belt village looks like a conveyor belt shifting anonymous figures
(the undead? golems? automatons?) to the City. Perhaps the golem idea is most
helpful, as it explains how one’s life is lived according to someone else’s
script – the employer’s – and supports Perry’s remark concerning the
“prevailing fluent emptiness of purpose in the commuting traffic.”
Monotony is certainly an element in the story here, but so
is what psychologists call “depersonalization/derealization disorder.”
“Depersonalization” is defined as “experiences of unreality, detachment, or
being an outside observer with respect to one’s thoughts, feelings, sensations,
body, or actions (e.g. perceptual alterations, distorted sense of time, unreal
or absent self, emotional and/or physical numbing.” “Derealization” is defined
as “experiences of unreality or detachment with respect to surroundings (e.g.
individuals or objects are experienced as unreal, dreamlike, foggy, lifeless,
or visually distorted).”
At another level there is also a sense here of what the
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called “Angest”, which Walter Lowrie
translated as “dread.” In this context the term refers to a feeling that, for
whatever reason, one is not becoming who one could or should become, and that
the conveyor belt is taking one away from oneself, as it were.