06 Nov 2007

Jack: “How long have you been here Grady?”
    Grady: “I’ve always been here.”
    
                 -The Shining, Stanley Kubrick

James Herner’s photographic series, Bryanston Court, explores the relationship that comes to exist between people and places, between place and memory, and between memory and absence.  

As in Kubrick’s re-working of Stephen King’s The Shining, he seeks to examine in his images the ways in which a certain location can find itself forever permeated with the psychic trace of its inhabitants, of how the memory of lives once led within a certain place come to fill it’s spaces like so many trapped ghosts. The visual similarity between James’ images and The Shining’s mise-en-scene give us the first indication of the series’ theme, a theme that James develops into a discreet and personal account in which Bryanston Court - where James lived with his grandmother before her death in 2004 - becomes the locus for the memories he has of her.

In the theatre of memory Bryanston Court and Matildhe Herner have become both interchangeable and inseparable for James.
As such, these images are essentially portraits – portraits of a person and portraits of a place - but not portraits as we would commonly understand or expect to see them.
Rather these are portraits in the sense that they aspire to reveal that which transcends mere physical description.

For James, to remember his grandmother, to truly picture her, becomes not just a question of appearance, but of also association.

In all the images in the Bryanston Court series it is important to note that we are never offered a single frontal image of James’ grandmother – we never really ‘see’ her in the usual sense. The opening image in which Matildhe gazes into her dresser mirror thus serves as the central metaphor around which the rest of the series revolves: that of reflection. As the series progresses we notice that Matildhe is no longer contained within the images, yet despite her physical absence from these images they contrive to speak of her nonetheless. The final image of the series returns us to a mirror, this time however there is no reflected face peering back at us, but for James she is just as much ‘there’ as in the first image; and like the ghost of Grady in The Shining, as long as Bryanston Court remains, she too will always be there.

The Bryanston Court Series of images are now available as individual prints from this website.