THE GINGERBREAD HOUSE

These images came out of a series of photographs called “The Gingerbread House” I was working on in March 2010 that examined the idea of the Uncanny in the 21st Century. Pumping stations, park keepers lodges and portaloo’s make up some of the subjects haunted by this concept and examine a notion that goes back to at least the Enlightenment. First made famous by Freud in his paper of 1919 called Das Unheimliche (The Unhomely), these images aim to highlight the distinctive nature of Freud’s thinking in that the uncanny is a force that derives its terror not from something externally alien or unknown but—on the contrary—from something strangely familiar which defeats our efforts to separate ourselves from it. Hopefully, by straddling the line between the known and the unknown, these images can create an unsettling response with the sense of the uncanny creating a cognitive dissonance (the idea of holding two contradictory thoughts simultaneously about the subjects) within the viewer.