What ghosts is Graham Walzer chasing? Past loves, tossed into a swimming pool? Childhood, innocence, meaning? No text is provided to help elucidate the mystery of his zine Chasing Ghosts: A4 paper, 50p., limited to 50 copies.
We nonetheless feel, as we do with much contemporary photography released through independent publishers, a fascination for a haunted sense of the ordinary and recklessly taken images. Strangeness and spirit, the traces of other worlds, have been a part of photography since its invention; the digital age has changed nothing. On the contrary. Regardless of the camera used, we are impassioned today by industrial imaging and the parasitic disturbances of vernacular photography.
In this respect, Graham Walzer does not surprise. With Chasing Ghosts, he serves as one of the thousands of surveillance cameras that document what usually goes unnoticed. So what if these young faces, these misty forests, have been seen elsewhere? What emerges is the belief of their creator in a magical photograph, and no doubt because of it, the reader’s desire to jump into that pool, to find one’s own ghosts in the swirling brown water.
$25 on Graham Walzer’s website.
