Oculus

Like spectral faces from a tale by Edgar Allan Poe, the photographic portraits of Danny Croucher encapsulate both the real and the imaginary. They are people of today but, perhaps, in other ways extended realities of the beyond within the everyday. The tone and evocation of a supernatural presence is an intended characteristic of Croucher’s photography. In reality and as Roland Barthes observed all photographs are ephemeral ghosts of sorts, since they born of an excised and/or arrested moment that will never return; their meaning are but the palimpsests of human memory. Yet if Croucher’s photographs often pursue a feeling for the supernatural they are never specifically macabre or mawkish, rather they embrace ephemeral notions of mysterious presence – the magic that exists within the wonder of the human face. Hence the sense of literary poetic wonder that is reflected in the haunting titles that he has given to his photographs.