"Access Points To What...?"

Central Nottingham, October 2016

For me, (and I suspect - for many others, who consciously think about these things), one of the chief pleasures of living in a city is the sense of inhabiting an infinitely complex, fractal labyrinth.  Major roads spawn minor roads, which in turn open onto pathways, cut-throughs and, as here, alleyways and passages.  There's a point at which public becomes private, of course, but still a great pleasure in knowing one could explore for years and never map the entirety of technically accessible thoroughfares.  The temptations of (benign) trespass shouldn't be discounted either.

There's an even more palpable thrill - often tied to an edge of implied danger, to be had from not knowing  what's in those obscure shadows -  or around that blind corner.   Progress down passages and corridors, pregnant with suspense, is, of course, a standard trope of the 'scary movie'.  And it's not one beneath supposed auteurs like Ridley Scott, whose first 'Alien' film made great play of it, or David Lynch - whose lens has habitually peered into obscure, linear spaces at moments of maximum psychic disturbance.

Hyson Green, North Nottingham, October 2016

I'm not sure if these two modest images can bear the weight of too much thesis, but they do seem to illustrate the general point.  They certainly indicate how I'm perpetually poking my camera into such nooks, - if only from the threshold, and both contain just the right degree of promising squalor (i.e. not so much as to be the primary subject - but just enough for atmospheric purposes).  I really love that combination of colonnade and deliciously-angled fire escape, in the first - not to mention the bend around a blind corner, and distant zone of impenetrable shadow.

The second is considerably more mundane, but carries the psychologically-loaded suggestion of access denied.  That is, until closer study reveals a narrow back passage running parallel to the brieze-block section.  The potential for a network of connecting thoroughfares, thus, immediately engenders a range of new possibilities.

One might choose to dismiss the overly-glib Freudian implications of all this.  But I suspect  such alleyways are as much access points to the subconscious, as they are to the city's more obscure physical recesses.