Phantasmagoric

Phantasmagoria, roughly defined, is a series of real or imagined images that seem as though from a dream or nightmare. My fascination with the idea of street photography, is that by going beyond capturing "decisive moments", one can use the camera to create images that imbue the everyday reality with an uncanny quality reminiscent of a dream- a woman distorted by a raindrop stands in front of a hulking fortress in the fog, a boy casually watches a paranormal incident, tourists seem lost on a barren alien planet. Some of these pictures were taken during particular moments: the streets nearly empty on the first day of lockdown as the remains of a face from a poster seem to represent the fading of public life in the face of a pandemic. A portrait in a mall of the newly dead queen seems to become a phantom haunting a country at a total loss with itself. Increasingly the "everyday mundane" that street photography is meant to isolate, elevate and "enhance" seems to become itself a surrealist experience, an odd fever dream that this time, we cannot wake up from.