Où Va Le Monde?

Où Va Le Monde? (Where Did the World Go?), Is the titular question of Noah Ringrose’s debut publication. It is a diaristic journey that documents Ringrose’s own lived experience and sense of mourning. 

The overworked grainy film photography of Ringrose exhibits a disparate and atomised world. A world that floods and pricks with metaphor as the minutia of external forms coalesce with internality. Noah’s images appear stark and moody but atmospheric, searching for meaning and direction, whilst also revealing a brutal tenderness and protective intimacy. Overall, there is the sense of desire to recognise and suspend pain in the making of photographs which feel like poetic grasps at the world. 

Où Va Le Monde? Is a phrase used by the elderly in France to mourn the state of the present. Arguably, photography is the language of grief, a ritualistic act in mourning for a present that can never ‘be’ again. The aesthetic of Ringrose is influenced by post war Japanese Provoke era photography (1960/70’s) which has found resonance in many contemporary photographers working presently, and especially in the north of England. In many ways the Provoke aesthetic of black and white grainy film has a charged politics to it. In Japan, Provoke developed as a visual language that symbolised a discontent brought on by American capitalistic incursions into daily life, psychically and physically, and thus an expression for mourning a disappearing sense of national culture. It’s adoption in the UK is equally politicised and visualises a psycho-corporeality that neoliberalism prescribes, a mourning of a sense of hope and direction. It invokes a tension underlying perceived reality, that ideology serves to disguise. 

Où Va Le Monde? points to the way photography allows for a psychodynamic relationship with the world as objects, and as photographs, and exemplifies an emancipatory potential in excavating and representing the personal to situate a present state of being.