Duncan Petrie

Gradually, we grew out of our past, explained away halos and beasts and cities of clouds. History is written by those that live in the present. But it’s still there, that old world. Beneath our own, a layer of myth like a first coat of paint. Glinting through chips and scratches. A dragon’s tail where the TV bumped the wall. Constellations in curtains and hand-blown glass. Echoes of old in the cracks of the new.

My work is a collection of those echoes. It depicts a world removed from our own, a world glimpsed in reflections and walls, in old paint and houseplants and long shadows on the ground.

My images, like an open window or tracks in the mud, are a sort of synecdoche: from a seed of familiarity, we imagine entire worlds at the edge of our own. Their potency is their unknowability; reality would only disappoint.

Many photographers like to think of their work as a kind of making. Here is an image I’ve made, they say. My photographs, however, are definitively found. They are spontaneous discoveries, glimpses of elsewhere removed of their context, a product as well as an impetus of longing.

Without place or time, without context from which to build, my images build on themselves. This world existed, they suggest, somewhere far and long ago, and you’re looking at its last remains. The world behind the borders of these images is both unreachable and very near, as near as the hearts between our bones; we are left, at its edge, to dream.