Gallery - [link]
August 2004. Philip Dhingra told me about an apartment in San José that he knew would interest me. The tenant had disappeared some two years earlier. No one knew where he had gone. The landlords had approached the Police and local authorities and were about to move in and clear the place.
I went in with the cameras one sweltering afternoon. It was in the 100s. The place was deeply disturbing. There were signs of packing, a suitcase on the stripped bed, packing cases, and the mess of organizing things. There was also a grenade on the dining room table, a five inch artillery shell in the kitchen, a watch, live round and credit card on the coffee table. Everything had been left behind. Or maybe not. There were two gun cleaning kits in the cupboard alongside a row of deodorants and after shave, but no guns.
I find the photo series very difficult and poignant. [link]
In a piece called Three Rooms I juxtaposed a sequence of evidences and archaeological remains of three rooms - a garrett in the east end of London in the late 1960s, a farmhouse bedroom in west Wales in the nineteenth century, and a dining room in the early city of Corinth in Greece. The juxtaposed fragments were textual mis-en-scènes - arrangements of items before the reader/viewer. Three forensic portfolios.
I first called this photo project "fourth room" to mark the connection between the apartment in San José and these three archaeological rooms, as well as the common themes of the documentation of presence/absence, the topic of "what comes after ...".
Now it seems more fitting to think of the locked door and what lies within - another archaeological and forensic topos or theme. See The Archaeological Imagination
See also Behind the locked door
