Writings
24/06/2026
While the roof collapses, nostalgia holds us together.
In October 2025, while visiting Berlin, I encountered Jeremy Shaw's Phase Shifting Index. The immersive film installation presented what appeared to be archival footage depicting groups engaged in collective rituals. Despite later discovering that the footage was entirely staged, I found it more emotionally affecting than much of the contemporary media I encounter every day. This raised a question: how can imagery masquerading as archival feel more truthful and meaningful than images drawn directly from the present?
We live in a world in which we are forced to encounter images daily, a never-ending stream of digital representations of the world around us. This constant barrage of online chatter has completely numbed us to the emotional weight of imagery and how it should make us feel. Leading to collective feelings of disconnection and detachment with the world and people around us. One of the few things that can retain this emotional weight is the archive and archival imagery. It holds a level of grounding that is hard to find today. Due to it being finite in nature and irreplicable in its context. It is often the only way back, into a given moment, in a given place, in a given time. Nostalgia now feels more complex than a simple longing for the past. Increasingly, it appears bound up with contemporary anxieties about the future and the difficulty of imagining alternatives to the present.
This essay will argue that archival imagery possesses a unique capacity to interrupt the spectacle of contemporary image culture. Through examining Guy Debord's theory of the spectacle, writings on photography by Roland Barthes, Mark Fisher's concept of lost futures, and Jeremy Shaw's Phase Shifting Index, I will explore how images of the past can provide spaces for reflection, connection and hope within an increasingly mediated and fractured present.
The past has passed but not yet come to pass. We live today in an endless present. When everyone of our memories can be accessed instantaneously, we get stuck in the revolving now. Nothing is allowed to fade on the Instagram grid, if something is needed it can be found within moments. This means that no time can truly pass in the way it ought to, nothing can be forgotten so less space remains for us to grow. When all we have to experience is other representations of the real world, we can’t truly shape ourselves as individuals. As the digital world expanded, the possibilities through which we encountered it became increasingly narrow. Guy Debord speaks to this through his idea of the spectacle, where he argued that the world was no longer lived directly it is instead watched consumed and mediated through images, the spectacle being this warping of reality. He states “The individual's gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere”. This describes a contemporary condition in which nothing appears specifically wrong, yet little feels attainable or worthwhile. We have numbed ourselves to the online world and now the real world by proxy. These relayed versions of the real world are inescapable and intoxicating, so too is their fallout.
A clear example of this I used within my work I found after deciding to scroll on twitter for the first time in years. And within five minutes of scrolling with no warning or protective barrier to entry, I saw a high-definition video of a man lighting himself on fire. This was filmed in broad daylight. The camera man, generally not sounding too distressed while he shouts for police officers. All the while, keeping a very steady shot, zooming in when he felt appropriate, making sure the framing is right. I then researched when it took place and it was April this year, outside a court hearing over Donald Trump. The man was seen earlier that day protesting outside the court then just before he lit himself on fire, he was reported to throw a number of pamphlets onto the ground that were “propaganda-based” covered with “conspiracy content”. While sadly, the events that transpired stand as a bleak reminder of where these online worlds can lead you. Living in this absurd reality. Where we can so easily get caught up in these indecipherable notions of what is real and what is fake in this hyper saturated, hyper directed information onslaught. What struck me most was not only the event itself, but the instinct to document it. Even in the face of extreme human suffering, the priority appeared to be recording and circulating the image. Debord's spectacle feels particularly relevant here. Experience is no longer encountered directly but increasingly mediated through representation.
But in my viewing of this imagery and more specifically my ease in doing so, really highlighted our inhumane relationship to these kinds of media. Leading us to not treat these online videos with the same kind of visceral repulsion that we should. This constant flow of incoherent online chatter means that you can always swipe it away and move onto the next. Manosphere content, next to met-gala outfit reviews, next to whatever hyper specific interest you have. This footage of a man burning alive can instantly be numbed by a counter video of something we like, something to take our minds off it. Now over years of coercion we have unknowingly trained our minds into thinking that this imagery doesn’t have to illicit the same kind of human response that is natural and healthy. We instead have welcomed this collective numbing agent. In which just as these abhorrent images don't cause a visceral sickness, neither does positive content illicit any sort of authentic feelings of fulfilment or satisfaction. If the spectacle produces a constant flow of images, then the question becomes whether any image can still interrupt that flow.
During a trip to Amsterdam, while wandering through a street market I found an old chest of film photos. They weren’t meant to be on display, I’m sure many would walk right past them. But this is what drew me in. Their lack of significance gave them a strange sense of significance. Because these are real people’s lives, they may not be the ones we see time and time again, projected onto us through our phones and TV screens. But they are real people all the same with stories that will forever be forgotten. Reading from his studio notes, I have been able to see how Gerhard Richter frames his intentions for working from source imagery, in turn helping me understand my own position within it. He states “Happenings, pictures, objects: the lay person has and makes all these in a way that puts every artist to shame. Have artists ever made objects remotely as large and as good as a lay person's garden?”.Richter took this to quite a literal sense trying to understand the perfect image and decipher what it is that sits within the aura of an image. But with the ever-present reproduction economy of today where things are recycled, altered, reshared and devolved, Richter’s insight provides a level of grounding. Here is what matters, and somehow these archival images speak closer to that notion of here, than what bombards us in our current day to day. Roland Barthes speaks to this in his book Camera Lucida. “In the daily flood of photographs, in the thousand forms of interest they seem to provoke, it may be that the noeme ‘This has been’ is not repressed but experienced with indifference.” Every photograph testifies that its subject really existed in front of the camera at a particular moment. Yet even for Bathes writing in the 80’s found that with an overwhelming quantity of images, this causes viewers to overlook this significance and engage photographs with increasing indifference. While the spectacle depends upon an endless circulation of images, the archive resists this. An archival photograph asks us to pause, to recognise a specific life and a specific moment rather than simply consuming another image. In this sense, the archive interrupts the spectacle. It is perhaps for this reason that archival imagery has become increasingly compelling, not because it allows us to return to the past, but because it offers a different perspective on the present.
While painting “We didn’t have time to run”, I was thinking about my late grandmother, one of the figures painted and what she would have thought of me running a marathon. Imagining her commenting on the absurdity of it, why I of all people would choose to do something like that. I started to question my own intentions for running the race and how it relates to the differing cultures in which we were each raised. Unlike my grandmother's generation, whose milestones often followed clearer social and economic pathways, many today find themselves searching for alternative markers of progress. Desperately trying to pretend they’re not clutching at these hollow self-affirming goals. Running a marathon or travelling to Thailand, won’t satiate the deep-rooted desire to feel like you have a grounded fulfilled place in the world
Fisher explains why this feeling exists, though his theory on lost futures. He believes our future is suspended, a slow cancellation. Tomorrow no longer appears as a space of possibility but as a continuation of the present. Fisher links this flattening of time to a broader cultural condition in which innovation increasingly gives way to repetition and recycling. This leads to a circulation of ideas in which cultural production increasingly recycles existing forms rather than generating genuinely new ones. The sense that culture is belonging to a certain moment, that is what has disappeared. This is only heightened with the advent of social media and with this hyper specific targeting of interests, there is no longer any room for a collective moment. In its infancy, there was an optimistic excitement at the liberatory potential of fragmented mass culture. Yet we now live in the real time reality-check of just how alienating and disconnected this fragmentation is. There is no community to be a part of, and so in allowing us everything, we cannot find anyone.
So just as these archival images do allow a certain grounding, they now also act as a projection of what should have been. Fisher argues that we are now all experiencing to varying degrees a form of anterograde amnesia. This being the condition in which an individual can recall events from their past while simultaneously being unable to form new memories of their present or future. “The theme was once homesickness for the past. Now it is the impossibility of the present.”
Circling back to Shaw’s ‘Phase Shifting Index’After watching the artist explain the work. This notion of transcendence and the natural human desire to escape the body is something that resonated with me. The idea that this term isn't fixed it can mean so many different things to different people. Nebulous transcendence, from religion to drugs to dancing, into yoga and meditation. Unlike the anonymous photographs discussed earlier, Shaw's images are entirely fabricated. Yet their emotional force suggests that the archive's power may not lie solely in factual truth, but in its ability to create a sense of shared experience.
The settings within the work, in which the footage is staged are fictional representations of the many subcultures and settings in which Shaw had found his own form of transcendence. These are places where a real person was able to carve out a space for transcendence. I like that in Shaws work, these characters are choosing to have real world physical experiences, attempting to change their reality. By choosing collective physical experiences over mediated ones, Shaw's figures suggest an alternative relationship to the present. These collective physical experiences suggest a temporary escape from the forms of mediation and isolation of today. Seeing this work, at the time that I did, while I was grappling with the many conflicting emotions of living in our post digital world and my own questions within the future of my practice. It made me feel at peace and reminded me that these thoughts and feelings that we all share, bear so much importance and demand to be discussed. That even though things seem bleak, there are still hopeful ways of looking forward.
Returning to the question that first emerged while watching Jeremy Shaw's Phase Shifting Index in Berlin, I was struck by the fact that footage masquerading as archival imagery could feel more emotionally truthful than the contemporary images I encounter every day. Throughout this essay I have argued that this is because archival imagery creates a distance from the spectacle of the present. In a culture saturated by endless representation, the archive offers a reminder that images can still act as traces of lived experience. Debord's spectacle describes a world in which life is increasingly mediated through images. Barthes reminds us that photographs still carry the weight of "this has been". Fisher demonstrates how this fractured relationship to time has left many of us haunted by futures that never arrived. Shaw's work suggests that the archive need not function as a retreat into nostalgia but can instead become a site for imagining new forms of connection. Archival imagery feels increasingly meaningful because it interrupts the endless circulation of contemporary images and allows us to reconnect with experiences that feel grounded, shared and human.
Perhaps the archive's greatest value lies not in preserving what has been lost, but in helping us recognise what remains. If contemporary life often feels fragmented and isolating, then images of the past can remind us of a simple but necessary truth: that our anxieties, hopes and desires have always been collective. The task is not to return to an earlier moment, but to carry that sense of connection forward. In this sense, nostalgia becomes less a longing for the past than a means of imagining a future that still feels possible. While the roof collapses, nostalgia holds us together while we grieve the loss of a future that didn't arrive.
Nostalgia for a more hopeful tomorrow. The past has already passed, but not yet come to pass. The present is a never ending loop, with no signposts to signify this ride being over or that we've strapped into the next one. This relentless hum of today causing the soul to drift away, up there looking down on this body, going through the motions of mediation trying to please everybody. Our selves are curated, while the concept of individualism is long lost. In a world where everyone is seen but not held. This is the liberation we were promised, but how does it live up to the adult life we were always longing. This freedom doesn't feel free, but nothing's holding us back. Except the pocket sized, moustraps that live under our pillows. Not yet set to catch rats, they're the ones winning the race. So hold on to your fellow mice, they might help you hold your place. We can choose what we say, how and when we say it, but when you've heard out everyone else's side, your own poignancy starts fading. We're all going down with the ship, but there's no risk of drowning. The string quartet play us our final song, though we've already heard it.
They gave us therapy to stop us fucking ourselves, then dating apps to get us to fuck eachother. Our most vulnerable moments are cast toward the amphitheatre, picked apart and discarded as if we were trading with a toddler. We’ve stolen all your depop likes, but honey please tell me all about your troubles and strifes. There's an IPA brewery that's just uncovered the meaning of life, it's somehow £3.30 but only on a Thursday, and I hope you're feeling flirty, because happy hour finishes at seven thirty. Our perfect Sunday consists of F1 and a roast, because this gastropub wants to hold a toast. To the day of rest, never coming to a close, because these small plates can't begin to hold our hunger for that feeling that no one really knows. We sit in our ivory towers as the crumbs of our never ending birthday cakes, trickle down to some poor bastard, clawing at the remnants. There's always someone worse off, but doesn't that make it worse. The idea of some poor soul, failed only by the curse of their birth. To which is broadcast for all to see, not to help or throw a lifeline, but just to be acknowledged and seen. Because silence is complicity, but to truly avoid it, you'd have to become a relentless foghorn martyring for the ones that never heard it.
We can again feel together, if things could just slow down before we drift into forever. These remnants of a time not too distant from our own, where plenty was wrong but at least we felt whole. Segregated and tucked away, hiding under the collective blanket. This pantomime of reality, seeping down to where you can no longer find it. Waking up with just enough flowers in our garden, knowing that reaching for sedation will be anything but reformation. Unable to take your hand away from the flame, we stare into the fire, our bodies all bubbling with blisters, trying to satiate our desperate desires. These colossal limbs are cooking under the fluorescent bulbs of today. Onlookers watch on, while they themselves start to decay. Some try to escape it but you can't help but be complicit. The world is ours so we should leave it how we found it. Shout out to the others that are drifting in the dark, just to say even though life doesn't feel real you're still here.
And while the roof collapses, Nostalgia holds us together. While we grieve the loss of a future that didn't arrive.