Photography and the uncanny

This is no mere faint shudder or tremor, or a momentary shadow crossing your mind. I'm talking about the feeling you get when an invisible hand grabs hold of your guts and twists them. Or when you sense that you are falling, faster and faster, and everything around you becomes a blur.

When Death smiles at you...

Helpful lady at the Sheffield Google pop-up website advice centre. It was Halloween so she let me take a photo of her in her mask...

Just a telephone kiosk, except that you've travelled one thousand years into the future after all human life has gone — and nothing has changed...

In Starting Point: An Introduction to the Dialectic of Existence Robert Denoon Cumming devotes a section to the 'wiggling bottom'. This one didn't wiggle at all...

Two seconds after I snatched this photo, the infant flopped out of its mother's arms onto the paving stones of Sheffield's Peace Gardens. — I hope not.

A tableau/ shrine constructed around an old newspaper cutting — and another image of death. I don't know whether the addition of a teddy bear was intentional or not, but that's the element that gives your guts a twist.

You probably won't get this. It doesn't matter because I get it. It's what I'm after.

I read somewhere that all photographs are uncanny. It's their irreducible, recalcitrant contingency. The difference is that contingency is what these photographs say as well as show.