This picture is part of a series of 85 black and white photographs of London. Entitled “Unreal City”, this photographic... Read More
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.
Millennium Bridge, Southbank. Eliot’s text here points to unhappy
domesticity and the diminution of thought in the waste land. The picture places
the latter idea in a religious context (St Paul’s Cathedral): do religious
questions still warrant our attention? Does religion have a genuine ability to
provide comfort and improve the lives of people in the waste land, or is it a
false hope which ultimately also relies on manipulative power structures?