City breaks statement
Abigail Reynolds, Jan. 2005

The Universal Now.

Well, it’s a kind of way of thinking ‘what if I could travel in time…’, and extending the way a photograph can only record a moment that has necessarily gone. And there’s something emotional about that gone moment that can only be partially re-accessed. When I think about time travel I am mostly thinking about the short film La Jetee by Chris Marker. In it he imagines a post-war world in which everything we now take for granted (children, sky, park) has gone. The clearest emotional response to this is that I feel really connected to those things again. The idea of travelling forward in time is melancholy as well as an exciting. In one of the images of Helsinki Cathedral that I have used there’s a boy standing with his mother, and it’s 1948. It’s obvious to think ‘that boy may well now be dead’ – but all moments in photographs are dead – which is why I don’t like photographs of myself and probably why I don’t like taking photos of the city. The city for me is something that never stands still. It is continually reinvented – but that’s hard to intersect with visually, especially as it’s so over-rich visually already. So, The Universal Now is named after a physical impossibility. There is no universal now in physics, but there is an imaginary now, an imaginary time-travel where all things are present. That’s why I like novels; they are time/place capsules. So, the work is trying to speak about that sort of imaginative possibility and privileging it really over a scientific impossibility.