Unbearably Beautiful: Why I Love the Photographs of Rachel Fleminger Hudson

An untitled photo by Rachel Fleminger Hudson 

rachelflemingerhudson.com

 

 

I.

 

As someone who grew up in the 1970s and remains amorously fascinated with the period - the music, the TV, the fashion, the football, the girls (not necessarily in that order) - of course I'm excited by the work of British photographer and filmmaker Rachel Fleminger Hudson ... 

 

 

II.

 

An ultra-talented graduate of Central Saint Martins and winner of the 2022 Dior Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talents, Fleminger Hudson's highly-stylised images recreate the aesthetics of the period within a contemporary cultural context, thereby loosening the "aura of necessity and sanctity surrounding categories of the present" [1].

 

Although often playful, her images are meticulously researched, carefully staged with authentic objects and outfits, and invested with ideas drawn from her intellectual background in cultural studies and critical theory; we can tell this by the fact that, when interviewed, she prefers to speak of hauntology rather than mere nostalgia [2], although, clearly, Fleminger Hudson is yearing for something in her work; if not for the past or for home as such, then perhaps for the intimacy of touch in a digital age. 

 

III.

 

People of a certain age - like me - might remember the '70s and even publish posts on their glam-punk childhood: click here, for example.

 

But nobody reimagines the decade better than Fleminger Hudson and it's this creative reimagining rather than a straightforward recollection that somehow best captures the spirit of the times and, more importantly perhaps, projects elements of the past into the future, so that we might live yesterday tomorrow - as Malcolm would say - rekindling sparks of forgotten joy [3].    

 

Although she's not a fashion photographer per se, it's the fashions of the 1970s that most excite Fleminger Hudson's interest; a true philosopher on the catwalk, she clearly believes that clothes maketh the period and express not only the individuality of the wearer, but embody the socio-cultural conditions of the time [4].

 

Why Fleminger Hudson has a particular penchant for the 1970s, I don't know. Arguably, she might have tied her project to an earlier decade, or even the 1980s [5].

 

Perhaps because the 1970s were a uniquely transitional time; one that was marked "by a change in values and lifestyles" as "modern society and its cult of authenticity gave way to a postmodernism based on reproduction and simulacra" [6]. 

 

 

IV.

 

Whether we think of Fleminger Hudson's work as a form of theoretically-informed fantasy, or as magically-enhanced realism, doesn't really matter. Because either way, her images are fabulous, relaying a narrative that is truer than truth [7] and revealing more about the past than historical facts alone.  

 

  

Portrait of the artist 

Rachel Fleminger Hudson

 

 

Notes

 

[1] William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. ix.  

 

[2] See, for example, the interview with Gem Fletcher on wetransfer.com (8 July 2024), in which Fleminger Hudson says: "I think about the work as anti-nostalgic. Nostalgia, for me, is about being homesick for a distant past. I'm not homesick for the past because I exist in the material world of the 70s now through my relationship with objects."

 

[3] See the post on retrofuturism dated 10 June 2024 entitled 'I Wanna Live Yesterday Tomorrow': click here. 

 

[4] On her website, Fleminger Hudson says that clothing is "an often overlooked symbolic language" and that one of her aims is "to engage with our psychological entanglement with our garments". Click here.

 

[5] Fleminger Hudson recognises this in the interview with Gem Fletcher on wetransfer.com (8 July 2024): "My work isn't a glorification of the 1970s. [...] In truth, I could be using any era."

 

[6] I'm quoting from a text on the Maison Européenne de la Photographie website showcasing some of Fleminger Hudson's work. She had her first solo exhibition at the MEP in 2023, curated by Victoria Aresheva, bringing together pictures from several different series of works. Click here.  

 

[7] The Jewish proverb that suggests that stories (fables) are truer than the truth is one I first heard being spoken by the South American writer Isabel Allende in a TED talk (March 2007): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present

Nick Land contemplates taking an exit provided 

by the photographer Florian Reinhardt [1]

 

 

I. 

 

According to Foucault, Kant defines Aufklärung in an almost entirely negative way; as an exit, a way out, or an escape route from the past, which he thinks of as marked by darkness, barbarism, and man's immaturity [2].

Funny enough, although Nick Land thinks of his own neoreactionary philosophy as an intrinsic contradiction to the process of enlightenment, he too is looking for ein Ausgang - only he wants an exit from modernity and from the age of Enlightenment [3]. 

 

Realising, however, that there can be no turning back, Land says that any form of conservativism is thus pre-emptively (and ironically) condemned to paradox – i.e., destined to become a kind of retrofuturism; projecting something vital - but also something lost, or forgotten, or denied that existed in the past - into the future.

 

 

II. 

 

D. H. Lawrence, who also sought an exit from the 20th-century and wished to step away from the light, understood this paradox better than most. His novel The Plumed Serpent (1926), for example, attempts to loosen the "aura of necessity and sanctity surrounding categories of the present" [4] and find some clue as to how we might live yesterday tomorrow.

 

Nietzsche too provides philosophical justification for taking what he calls a retrograde step once man has attained a certain level of enlightenment and emerged from superstitious fears and religious concepts. In other words, he has to recognise the importance that resided in old ideas and traditions and that "without such a retrograde step he will deprive himself of the best mankind has hitherto produced" [5].    

 

Good people - the enlightened, who are afraid of the dark - will say this lapsing back into old life-modes that have been surpassed is a form of evil. Whilst that mightn't worry a Nietzschean, Lawrence was at pains to stress that this wasn't a "'helpless, panic reversal'", [6] but was, rather, something performed consciously and with care.

 

And, to reiterate: it's not a return so much as an exiting of the present into the past in order to enter the future.   

 

 

III.

 

Returning to Land, we find a contemporary thinker who is prepared to express his disillusionment with the "direction and possibilities" of the democratic political order born of the Enlightenment. For Land, as for many neoreactionaries and libertarians, freedom - in the classical liberal sense - is no longer compatible with democracy and the expansion of a voracious welfare state. 

 

And many of these people have ceased to care; for them, "democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself" and they are now searching for "something else entirely: an exit".  

 

When you risk being eaten alive in what Land thinks of as a coming zombie apocalypse, then flight becomes the ultimate imperative. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] During a period of almost ten years, German filmmaker and photographer Florian Reinhardt snapped over a 1000 pictures on his iPhone of exit signs all over the world. Readers who are interested can find them in a book entitled Exit published byHatje Cantz (2021). Click here for further information on Reinhardt and his work; or here to visit his exit.art website. 

 

[2] See Michel Foucault's essay 'What is Enlightenment?' in The Foucault Reader, trans. Paul Rabinow (Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 32-50, in which he discusses Kant's 1784 essay 'Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?' (usually referred to in English simply as ‘What Is Enlightenment?’).   

 

[3] Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Books, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online: click here. Note that I am quoting here from the first part of this online version.  

[4] William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. ix. 

[5] Nietzsche, Human, all Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1993), I. 1. 20, pp. 22-23. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clarke (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 138.

 

 

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate (4 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism (6 July 2024): click here.  

And I Wanna Live Yesterday Tomorrow

Malcolm McLaren Paris (1994)

 

'The only artist capable of rekindling the spark of hope in the past is the one who is 

firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe if the enemy is victorious.'

 

 

I.

 

Retrofuturism - born of the fact that capitalist realism makes tomorrow inconceivable - doesn't imagine future worlds that are projections from the present; it imagines future worlds that are reclaimed from the past. 

 

At first, this seems like fun. But there's a certain melancholic pessimism in concluding that since one can no longer look forward and dream of what might be, one is obliged to look back and (wistfully) recall what might have been. 

 

No wonder that the cultural theorist most often associated with this idea, Mark Fisher, topped himself.

 

However, for those who can bear it, retrofuturism's exploration of the tension between past and future - and between the alienating and empowering effects of technology - is a philosophically fascinating topic; one that, surprisingly, has quite a long history - certainly pre-dating Fisher's analysis - although its import as a concept has grown in recent years, perhaps as the present becomes ever-more unbearably dystopian. 

 

 

II.

 

Funny enough, although the word retrofuturism wasn't then part of my philosophical vocabulary, I first came across the idea in a song recorded by Malcolm McLaren in 1994, the last line of which is: And I wanna live yesterday tomorrow [1].

 

I remember thinking at the time that it was a nice, rather clever line - probably borrowed, I assumed, from one of those writers, like Walter Benjamin [2], who meant a great deal to McLaren, but I didn't reflect any further on it. 

 

However, thirty years later, and here we are ... The line has come back to haunt me and this paragraph from McLaren on reclaiming history (rather than just pissing on it) now seem to me of crucial importance: 

 

"The question I find most interesting is how you reclaim history. This is a very different thing from repackaging it. It's not about nostalgia, which is basically dead tissue. Living yesterday tomorrow should be about reclaiming history then reversing it into the future. If you can discover how to do that, you are probably doing everything an artist genuinely wishes to be involved in. One must aim to use certain disruptive practices to challenge the dominant cultural forms and relax the grip of authority." [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The song I refer to is entitled 'Mon Dié Sénié' and can be found on McLaren's album Paris (1994): click here to play.

 

[2] See what Benjamin writes, for example, in the well-known essay 'On the Concept of History', in Selected Writings, Vol. 4., (Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 389-400. Composed of twenty numbered paragraphs, this short work by Benjamin is essentialy a critique of historicism.

 

[3] Malcolm McLaren, quoted by Paul Gorman, in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2002), pp. 718-19.