New England - Land of Ghosts and Stories.

This selection of photographs is from a larger number that I took in New England in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

As any series of artworks will tend to do, they have become a kind of 'audit trail' of my 'psychological transactions' from that time. But fifteen years have passed since they were made, and the passage of time allows me to stand back from them somewhat, and view them, to an extent, as if they were unconnected with me personally.

When I do this, I find myself surprised by the collective impression that I get from them. What strikes me now is the general absence of human beings. Of course I was aware of this when the pictures were taken, but I don't think I anticipated the sense of an empty stage set that would be created when viewing these pictures as a collection. I'm struck as much by what has been excluded as by what has been included.

It intrigues me that this realisation recalls to mind one of my abiding memories of those visits to New England, which is the strange sense I often had that, in my fancy, was the presence of the ghosts of the native inhabitants. I felt this almost everywhere, whenever I went beyond the immediate precincts of human habitations, and especially in woodlands. It was a sense of being carefully watched by invisible eyes.

In my photographs, the immigrant peoples who displaced the former natives have been physically subtracted too. But nevertheless they remain present in genius because of the depiction of their apparently abandoned artefacts, their cars, buildings, machinery and furniture. These seem to offer a kind of archeology, clues to the daily habits of some vanished tribe. This impression is amplified by the choice of subject matter, which frequently concentrates on the dilapidated and obsolete, and seems to hint at some event that has carried most of the people away to leave a land as strangely empty as the Marie Celeste, no longer actively maintained.

What is a stage set without a dramatic story? It is a vacuum waiting to be filled by the imagination of the viewer. To my own imagination there is something about these monochrome images of the United States that seems to unlock hidden histories of my youth, back in the nineteen fifties, when television was black and white and, accordingly, so were my notions of far away America.

Martin Baxter, February 2008