Postcards from the End of the World

By Sophie Chester-Nash

This set of photographic postcards takes ordinary scenery from the midday cityscapes of London and uses a slow shutter technique to deliberately blur what we can see to create an aesthetic vision of place, enhancing blues, pinks and golds within our gaze. A blur or an abstraction from what we think we understand asks us to draw perception into a more complete wisdom, even if at first it seems to be missing something. The pictures are allegories in Elsewhere Journal’s formation of the “the end of the world”, of a place both living and dying. As the world suffers through a sociological collapse engineered by late stage capitalism, ongoing colonial violence, and self-preservation, we observe the beauty and confusion, the survival and erasure, the oblivion and complicity of the place around us in one capture. At the edge of the series, a question about the quality of the lens is posited — when nothing is in focus, can you visualise a future that isn’t ending?

Sophie Chester-Nash is a mixed Brit-Bengali social documentary photographer, writer and filmmaker whose work plays with social surrealism and focuses on grassroots political movements. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Notts Live and Now Then Mag.