“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
This collection of found snapshots is called ‘Anguish, Affliction and Alienation in Photography’. It’s what photography collector Robert E. Jackson, from whose great archive they come, thought of calling it. As he tells us: “I would like this please to be used as the title. I struggled with it to explain what I was trying to do in this post.”
The pictures are extraordinary.each one the spark for a story untold…
I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real– Nine Inch Nails, Hurt
“May [God’s] name be blessed and magnified .. whispered my father. For the first time, I felt revolt rise up in me. Why should I bless his name? The Eternal, Lord of the Universe, the All-Powerful and Terrible, was silent. I had ceased to pray. How I sympathised with Job! I did not deny God’s existence, but I doubted his absolute justice.”
– Ellie Wiesel, Night
“He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath – “The horror! The horror!”
– Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
“It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, “And this too, shall pass away.”
— Abraham Lincoln, 1859 address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society
“‘Wrong!’ Westley’s voice rang across the room. “Your ears you keep, so that every shriek of every child shall be yours to cherish—every babe that weeps in fear at your approach, every woman that cries ‘Dear God, what is that thing?’ will reverberate forever with your perfect ears. That is what ‘to the pain’ means. It means that I leave you in anguish, in humiliation, in freakish misery until you can stand it no more…”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride
Hurt so good
Come on, baby, make it hurt so good
Sometimes, love don’t feel like it should
You make it hurt so good– John Cougar Mellencamp, Hurts So Good
“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Confusion in her eyes that says it all
She’s lost control
And she’s clinging to the nearest passerby
She’s lost control– Joy Division, She’s Lost Control
Well, I can’t forget this evenin’ or your face as you were leavin’
But I guess that’s just the way the story goes
You always smile, but in your eyes, your sorrow shows
Yes, it’s shows– Harry Nilsson, Can’t Live
“At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
“there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it’s too late
and there’s nothing worse
than too late”— Charles Bukowski, Oh, Yes
“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch
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