I took this picture when I was out riding my bike one afternoon. This overturned trailer seemed to emerge in front of me as I crested a hill. Something about it seemed surreal- it had the kind of melancholic aura of a dead animal. I’d actually forgotten about the photo I took until I got the roll developed.
Recently I’ve been reading Murakami’s 1Q84- a fictional text set in 1980s Tokyo. The characters play out their lives against the backdrop of an ordinary world. The banalities of this world are meticulously described in the book- a character’s receding hairline, the wind catching the fabric of their clothing- even the candid musings of their internal monologue. It’s as though Murakami makes a point of labouring the unremarkable until, inexplicably, we learn that there are two moons in the sky. We’re not told why, this aberration just becomes a part of the text’s landscape.
Writing about where magical realism differed from the expressionist genre with which it was often conflated, Franz Roh emphasises:
"...it seems to us that this fantastic dreamscape (expressionism) has completely vanished, and that our real world re-emerges before our eyes - bathed in the clarity of a new day. We recognise this world, although now - not only because we have emerged from a dream - we look on it with new eyes"
For Roh, this post expressionist genre was characterised by the way it enhanced reality and made things more real than the gestural, abstract qualities that are associated with expressionism. Although both genres were ultimately tools to better convey a sense of the author’s reality, magical realism would ‘clarify’ material truths by contrasting them against lies. To put this into my own recent context- I realised that the plausibility and truth of the characters’ dress in 1Q84 was enhanced by the duplicated moons. The abnormality brought forward the normality.
I thought it was interesting to learn that Roh was a photographer. Magical realism is a phrase I’ve only ever thought of in association with literature- but in a way it seems more pertinent to the photograph and its ongoing veracity debate. I’ve always loved the way that Franz Kafka describes the way an image can ‘fuse dream and reality’:
“Nothing is left but looking, an obsession in which time is suspended while, as we sometimes feel in dreams, the dead, the living and the still unborn come together on the same plane”
These ideas brought me back to this image I’d taken. The overturned trailer felt like a small aberration that I might have missed if my mind had been somewhere else, but it’s curious sense of otherness held something reminiscent of a duplicate moon.