There’s an impulse in photography to want people in the frame, some human-centric desire to justify the world’s existence by locating it in reference to ourselves. Even when the real focus of the shot is something else (graffiti, abstract curves) we look for that humanising presence. Maybe this is because when photographed without us, our rooms (and the objects in them) seem haunted by our absence, waiting for us with a gravitational patience that is almost sinister. All these dolls, ladders, mirrors, looms, left behind by us, temporarily or forever. Armchairs broken and tattered, drum-kits mute with yearning, wallpaper coiled like a fairy-tale curse. And everywhere time, held in place by our temporal tricks, flaring outwards without us, engulfing everything.
So empty rooms. Except these photos aren’t empty, just empty of us. Shorn of us, what does our world look like? There’s pathos, sure, things pining, lost without us. There’s mystery, unspoken implications hovering in vacated space, stories feeding on imaginative absence. But also, without us, all these details, patterns and objects seem to take on a new insistence. Look at us, they say. We’re not just things are we? Yes, they reek of us, saturated with sub-atomic transference; skin, sweat, dreams, fears, but now they’re awake to their own existence. No longer inanimate, they pulse with presence, with existential awareness, alive with confusion, sorrow and menace. Yes, there’s something unsettling here. Maybe these rooms are empty like traps. Temporal glitches waiting for prey. Maybe we haven’t left these rooms, they’ve just disappeared us.
Photos © Brian Phelan