"A cursory glance suggests that the young woman illuminated by a shaft of sunlight is alone and smiling at someone or something beyond the edge of the image. A second glance reveals a second body materializing from the deep shadow beside her. A long string of pearls, looped like a slack halo around her neck, gives definition to the spectral outline of the figure of an older woman dressed in black. The young woman curls her arm around the shoulders of her shorter companion in a gesture of familiarity with these everyday rituals: instant poses for an instant camera. She seems comfortable with herself and with the occult forces manifested by this momentary invasion of privacy that includes an uncanny capacity to

stop

time.

The photographer remains another factor beyond the edge of the image, part voyeur, part vampire. Pointing the lens down at the two figures from an elevated position, this unseen agent becomes transfixed by the static biosphere of the camera’s optical unconscious. Everything is under erasure yet in a state of suspended oblivion. The inky darkness that has absorbed the older woman spreads ominously down the right-hand side of the young woman’s body, making it difficult to discern whether she is wearing a dress or a matching summer jacket and skirt. The fashion is as equally hard to date as it is to decipher. 1970s? 1980s? Earlier? Later?

Other mysteries quickly develop. What is the emotional rather than spatial relationship between the two figures? Mother and daughter? Friends and neighbours? Is this play of light and shade the product of an amateur or a professional eye? An accidental memento mori from the family scrapbook or a stylized commentary on mortality? The setting appears to be domestic. But are the two figures standing in an interior or exterior space? Two intersecting lines occupy the left of the photograph, indicating the architectural framework of a larger geometric structure: a door, window, wall, fence? Where was this image taken? North America? Europe? Could we narrow the possibilities down to specific sites: Los Angeles? London? An edge city condo? A house on the suburban borderlands?

(Perhaps the young woman is now close to the same age as the figure beside her and at this very moment poses for another camera, fading into the darkened background while a younger version stands bathed in a comparable burst of light.)

A motionless image, its significance remains fluid. A happy snap anatomizing melancholy. An impromptu performance loaded with metaphysical tension and ontological confusion. Could the figure of the old woman actually be someone younger? Someone male? Could the string of pearls be the white piping on a v-shaped jersey? And what are the alien objects generating a constellation of lights across the lower half of the image? One appears as a scratch messing up the paintwork at the point of intersection of the blue-white lines. Another is visible as a dim strip located on the ghost lapel of the shadowy figure – perhaps an ornate brooch in the shape of a bronze butterfly or a silver leaf or a golden knot? A milky teardrop radiating from the young woman’s solar plexus completes one triangulation: a chakra alignment where pendant meets punctum. Is this bright stain merely a smear of refracted light or does its presence intimate a supernatural foreshadowing of the void left after the soul of the subject vacates its vault of meat to merge with the infinite?

Resonating with submerged memories that rupture the present, the threshold condition of the image generates associative chains of meaning. But what other sensory stimuli permeate this scene? What odours would transport us back to that moment? What compendium of tastes and textures would begin to recreate that atmosphere? And what anthology of sounds accompanied the click of the camera?

While we watch these two figures on the threshold, Osmiroid tune into the scrambled patterns and fucked-up frequencies of our psychic archives, navigating between the cellular and the cosmic, the astral and the infernal." – HD