Somnambulism 2015-2022
The places we’ve been,
The things we have seen,
Is this reality
Or a Somnambulist’s dream?
Somnambulism comes from the latin word’s to sleep “somnus” and to walk “ambulare”, commonly referred to as sleepwalking this involves the obvious, walking about while asleep, but can also include the performing of complex behaviours while unconscious. I don’t suffer from it myself, that is to say I’ve not to this moment in time gone to bed only to find myself sitting on a bus in my pyjamas hours later, but I have always felt that life in itself can sometimes feel like little more than a waking dream. We live our lives touching each other for brief moments, and as time flows like a stream over and around small and insignificant pebbles on its bed, later we will have forgotten we even existed, barely noticing the world around us even though we interact with it and the others who inhabit it on a constant basis. How many faces can you recall having seen today when you went about your daily business?
Personally I have always been fascinated by observation, watching the world go by and the briefest of interactions we have with the others who share it. I am quite happy sitting on a bench and just people watching for hours on end, inventing things about what I see and imagining little backstories for the characters I observe. It’s part of the reason I enjoy photography as it’s a craft that can be honed using a tool specifically designed to both capture the real and invent the fantastical, to create a visual storybook that can tell tales of the most benign and mundane situations in interesting ways. And like waking from a particularly vivid dream, the images that it creates are both full of life, wonder, the normal and the bizarre while all the while, if lacking context, half remembered and confusing.
This body of work is a collection of 350+ images made between 2015 and 2022, in many different locations and through it I hope to show that despite our borders, our cultures and languages we are one and the same and to visualise the differences and similarities the occupants of this planet possess. In essence we are all just evolved primates that have spread out across what feels like huge distances but is in fact merely a ball of rock hurtling through a vast vacuum of emptiness and obscurity, and when you stop to think about it we are actually quite insignificant. That’s sort of the point, we are aware of our insignificance. Humans possess a unique, if not cursed, skill that sets them apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, our awareness of our own mortality. Perhaps we take comfort by not thinking about the grand scheme of things? Simply put, do we sleepwalk through life?
There is another magic trick that photography performs, a power that bends the boundary between sorcery and science, how to cheat death. You see it is my firm belief that every living person can only truly be gone once three things have happened; firstly physical death, secondly the last time your name is mentioned by those who remember you once you’re gone and lastly, when there is no trace of your existence left. This final one is the most important as that trace of you can be anything, the lives you touched, the memories you left behind for others, the objects you possessed and things you created or were a part of, this is how immortality is achieved.
Somnambulism is my attempt to do just this through documenting the world as I see it and the people who inhabit it, using photographic equipment that has already passed through many hands before me, and will pass through many more afterwards. Each of these people, including myself, will live on through what that tool see’s, and every soul that is captured upon a photograph shall also live forever as a physical record of their brief existence in this world.
Even if we are merely sleepwalking through our lives, we are leaving an imprint of ourselves upon others and the world around us as we do.
Ed Worthington
Cardiff January 2023
