Ken Taylor

The Outside Coming In - Photographic Conversations

29th May - 31st August 2020

This postcard album follows a yearly ritual, started in 2014, of making a visual album, akin to musicians producing an album of tracks. The six previous collections have been composed of photographs taken on my travels, both near and far. They are snapped with an ordinary pocket camera, of the digital variety, and map the places my eye is instinctively drawn to. They are ambient rather than technical, relishing the meeting of the digital with the romance of a good old postcard; a place of freedom to send a hand composed greeting.

As the shops retreated on my exercise walks in late March, I noticed impromptu signs appearing, and I began to photograph them. They had a fascination in their variety and nuanced differences, both graphically and in the way they were saying the same thing; we’re closing! However I was struck by the fresh insight they gave to familiar locations, through the way these texts were presented, as an unusual new phenomenon in the local landscape. Looking at the initial rushes when I returned home, I could see myself reflected on the outside looking in, and of course suddenly not being allowed to enter. The glass in the window was generally dark, reflecting a mirage like incidental world behind me. This had a sinister edge beyond my immediate control that I liked as a consequential other but of course rather echoes the character of the virus.

Having moved house in the winter the weather living there had been predominantly rainy, so as spring appeared, I’d found myself snapping how the traces of the outside were configuring my new home. Being an East - West facing terraced house, these photos meditated on the perennial beauty of light and time. In contrast to the signs in the shop windows this was a space I could be in, and had to be in; I had the autonomy to reflect on what was coming through the window. Indeed, there was also the time to do so.

As with previous albums I have been fascinated by the idea of retreating from the photograph as a singular object or moment of epiphany, and engaging them in a process or conversation. With this, use, rather than function comes into play, and inevitably, time, with the line of language between. So an intuitive, quick series of playful dialogues ensued arranging the images as diptychs. The outside images seemed to lend themselves to the western, night side of the image, while the natural reading, from left to right, suggested the inside images of home being to the sunrise in the east.

In the torrent of reflections by commentators on our new evolving world, the clear message is that we need to adapt. Hopefully it will go the way of Greta and youth, and not the way of the 73 year old, No. 45, as Wim Wenders, the film director refers to the current 45th president of the USA.

Ken Taylor is an Artist/ Curator/ Architect who takes a lot of photographs, and is 5 minutes younger than his twin sister .