After some feedback on the first draft and a couple of days of thinking about it I’ve done an alternative version. The main differences are:
- a new title ‘Both are lost’ (from the poem line that opens the intro text)
- coloured backgrounds for the text statements
The reason for the latter is that I felt that the text still resembled a caption more than an ‘equivalent’ and so I wanted a way of visually tying it into the picture better – to see text and image as a ‘pair’.
I’m away now for a week so will put this to one side and come back to it when I return….
About the work
“When one glove is missing, both are lost”
(Roger McGough 2000)
Losing a glove is, in a small way, a peculiarly disorienting experience. You lose something that leaves behind its mirror image to remind you of the loss.
Seeing items that other people have left behind in public reminds me of my own memory lapses over the years (well, the ones I can remember, anyway).
I’d already been collecting photos of lost gloves for a few years when I started investigating aspects of memory as part of my photographic practice. I’m particularly interested in the unreliability of human memory. The two threads became connected in my mind. Everybody loses something every day, though usually just a memory, and it’s usually unimportant. Usually.
Evidence of other people’s lapses of attention or memory reassures me that I’m not alone in my forgetfulness; at the same time, it triggers an oddly symmetrical train of thought about remembering forgetting.
With these images I want to capture a middle-aged sense of realising that you’ve forgotten something: a fleeting moment of panic followed by the nagging sense that this forgetfulness might be symptomatic of slowly losing your faculties.
The physical presentation format is a book dummy, so this set begins with a cover image. The main images in the series are presented here in horizontal format to emulate a double-page spread.
Click on the first image to see a bigger slideshow version – better for reading the text.
Both are lost
Rob Townsend 
Hello Rob, you commented on my blog that we have both arrived at using colour with text but most likely for very different reasons. I am trying to convey an emotion or rather very different emotions though the use of different colours. Have you thought about why you have chosen these colours and what the significance of them (if any) are for you?
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Hi Jane, I confess my choices of text background colour are purely visual, as I simply picked out the main colour of the glove in the accompanying photo, so no relevance beyond that in this instance. I added the colour because I was seeking a visual connection between the image and the text, as my intention is to present the text as an ‘equivalent’ to the image rather than a caption or title. Every other execution I tried, the text still read like it was somehow trying to describe the image, which isn’t my intent. Colour is the only thing I’ve landed on so far that elevates the text to more of an image-counterpart, if that makes sense. And I’m not wholly sure whether the coloured backgrounds will be a part of the work as it develops, as I might yet come up with another solution…
By the way, I got your email and will reply shortly – been away for a week and still catching up.
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