Paul Freeman | Space Lands

Cameron Davidson — Fri, 15 May 2009 17:54:47 +0000

Paul Freeman is a photographer friend from England. He is presenting a long-term personal project titled “Spacelands” to several publishers and decided to create a blurb version of the book.

He is a killer architectural shooter. Last month Paul and four photo industry friends (one Israeli, one Ozzie and two Englishmen with same first name – Jules and Julian) and myself got together for lunch at RULES in London. I believe RULES may be the oldest restaurant in the city. (1798 by Thomas Rules)

Paul shoots medium-format digital and the work is spectacular.

From the forward

“I became culturally obsessed by the space age when I was nine years old, in the final days of the British colony in Singapore. This was about the time my father introduced me to photography. My absorption by space fantasies and Americana was determined by pivotal moments that stand out like vertical beams of light.

One such moment brought me visions of the desert and happened on an evening when my parents were out. My brother and I crept downstairs, knowing that our young ahmah was canoodling with her boyfriend on our bamboo frame sofa. She usually let us watch the TV after our bedtime. The programs included the Outer Limits which could sometimes send us running back up to bed in terror. This particular evening through the monochrome flicker of the TV we saw an image of a desert land. Into this space we watched Mr Sulu and Lieutenant Uhura materialise in the flash of light from the transporter beam. Our eyes were the size of saucers. There was a black lady on TV with an asian man; they were in an alien desert and had ray guns. It was a different social order – one not yet realised in our living room.

Later that year I anticipated the moon landing for interminable months, scrapbooking articles from the Straits Times. The moon landing went exactly to plan; it followed the diagrams I’d collected from the newspapers to the most infinitesimal detail until we eventually saw the flickering apparition of the man in the EVA suit planting his flag on the surface of the moon. There was great comfort to be obtained in such scientific certainties. I had expected to see something like this from the moment I sat in the cinema in Singapore City watching ‘2001 a space odyssey’. It felt like the future was predictable, my life was planned out – Neil Armstrong had planted his flag, In 2001 America would be gleaming white, designed by Verner Panton, surgically clean and aesthetically depopulated. By then I would be in space. All I had to do was wait.

That sense of mathematical predictability was not to continue as the years went by. Space, and my life in it, remained stubbornly distant as it became clear that the cold war had simultaneously powered and destroyed these fanciful ideas. Since 2001, space tourism has become a surrogate for those idealistic dreams of the first space age. In New Mexico and across the desert states of the American South West one can find the decayed remnants of that first age which twinned utopian ideals from science fiction with the diabolic machinery of potential mega-mass murder. One also finds the sites of a new tourist driven future for space travel. A few miles and a range of low hills separate the site of the planned Spaceport America (where Richard Branson plans to launch his spectacular Virgin Galactic spaceline sometime in 2010), from the site of the first atomic explosion. Between these two locations lie discarded rockets, atomic age ghost towns, alien landscapes, and a town that renamed itself after a radio show. “

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/673478

I bought one.

Cameron Davidson | 500 AGL » paul freeman

Paul Freeman | Space Lands