Instant Views [o.] Haunted Air | A collection of anonymous Halloween Photographs from America, c.1875 – 1955 | Ossian Brown / David Lynch

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Haunted Air |  A collection of anonymous Halloween Photographs from America, c.1875 - 1955 | Ossian Brown / David Lynch
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“All the clocks had stopped. A void out of time.
And here they are – looking out and holding themselves still –
holding still at that point where two worlds join –
the familiar – and the other.”

David Lynch

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“I was somewhere else. I thought I was someplace but now I didn’t know that place.
I seemed to be inside foreign worlds where there was some kind of troubling camaraderie
—as if a haunting joke was known to everyone but me and yet faintly I knew it too.
I couldn’t pull away—it was all like a magnet and there was beauty in it. Human creatures
with the feeling of being turned strange and open to falling and glee—they seemed to have
a glee for somehow stitching a laugh to darkness.”

David Lynch

 
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Ossian Brown
A collection of anonymous Hallowe’en Photographs
America, c.1875 – 1955

With an introduction by David Lynch, afterword by Geoff Cox

“These are pictures of the dead: family portraits, mementoes of the treasured, the held-dear-in-heart, now unrecognizable, other. Torn from album pages, sold piecemeal for pennies and scattered, abandoned to melancholy chance and the hands of strangers. Frayed by forgetting, they are homeless ghosts: summoned and stranded, double-fleshed by corrosion. Acted upon by chemical rot and paper’s fray, by sun and mould and jam-stained fingers, their surfaces penetrated, moth-eaten, worm-bored, worn away. Time-spots, black-fleck swarms, mimic the hypnagogic eye’s gaze. Silvered grains work loose on the image like sands in an hourglass, sliding and re-gathering. Age becomes them as it undoes them. Vanitas, vanitas…”

Geoff Cox

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