We love images. There are of all of kinds. There are banal images, of which there are many; repulsive images, of which there are many; beautiful images, very beautiful images, sublime images, and so on. And there are also, intertwined, enchanting and mysterious images, like Michael Lundgren’s.
Instances:
Lundgren’s photographs are, if you will, narrative-enactive; in other words, they encourage us to seek out the story behind the context, the imaginary hypertext (but verb is made of soil, ain’t it?). There are two things here ↑. First is this sort of claw mark on the floor, as if left by a monster. And then this strange light. Where does it come from? A car headlight? These are clues that allow us to extrapolate.
Instance:
We sometimes read that the sky is torn across (D. Thomas), that it is tearing itself apart. This is the case here ↑, with a rendition never seen before.
I really like this one ↑. It obviously brings to mind Jacob’s ladder. Genesis:
| 28:10 | And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward Haran. | |
| 28:11 | And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep. | |
| 28:12 | And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. | |
| 28:13 | And, behold, the LORD stood above it, and said, I am the LORD God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed; | |
| 28:14 | And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. | |
| 28:15 | And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of. | |
| 28:16 | And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not. | |
| 28:17 | And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. | |
| 28:18 | And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. | |
| 28:19 | And he called the name of that place Bethel: but the name of that city was called Luz at the first. |
The story doesn’t say whether the ladder was really there. No, because it’s a dream. Yes, but it can just as easily be formalised, sketched out, and it’s not impossible that the photographer had this idea in mind while shooting; except that he certainly didn’t install the ladder here. For that matter, is it even a ladder? It looks like one. The metal trace, a vestige of an artificialized past, in which nothing remains but this fragment of a Jacobean ladder.
Here ↑, probably, the remains of a spaceship, falsely alien.
This image ↑ illustrates Lundgren’s motif quite well, namely the interplay between naturalness and intervention. We don’t really know how it can be that Nature produces such a parallelepiped, and yet, as it seems, vomitting matter ?
This is a landscape with something strange in the air… If you consider that on the ground below, these lines are those of a river and roads, then the size of this suspended luminous object is quite considerable.
Surely any good experienced photographer here will have some idea of how Lundgren went about getting this image. But I don’t fall into that category. So I leave it to candour, and am prepared to accept that it existed. And this pleases me. Hypotheses: 1) A cosmic test tube took a sample from the ground — see the level, 2) A wormhole window has appeared, which, as we know from astrophysical speculation, opens onto a black hole on one side and a white hole on the other. And it is indeed a white hole that we see here.
Léon Mychkine