Austin Reynolds

This series of photographs was inspired by Ray Bradbury's ‘No Particular Night or Morning’ taken from The Illustrated Man. The story tells of two men traveling into space, one is Clemens a man that wishes to explore more of his mind while the other is Hitchcock who wishes to forget. Hitchcock embracing solipsism, and believing that neither night nor morning exist, refuses to believe anything about reality without sufficient evidence and soon becomes skeptical of everything he cannot directly experience. Clemens continually tries to change Hitchcocks’ views of the world, but he cannot and soon finds Hitchcock questioning whether he existed prior to the present moment. He gradually gets more philosophical and questions his whole reality and by the end finds himself swimming the deep sea of space, ‘a space with nothing on top, nothing on the bottom, a lot of empty nothings between.’

Hitchcock stated that he wanted mental evidence that he could feel, not physical evidence that you had to drag in. Bradbury’s story prompted me to explore an idea of god and dreams: God as an omnipotent being that is eternally with us, we cannot see him and thus only allowing us to believe in our minds that he exist and like the thoughts that exist of god in our mind lies the dreams that undergo in the night. These photos are the product of that interpretation. 

"There isn't any season here; winter and summer are gone. So is spring, and autumn. It isn't any particular night or morning; it's space and space."

"You see. You have no mental evidence. That's what I want, a mental evidence I can feel. I don't want physical evidence, proof you have to go out and drag in. I want evidence that you can carry in your mind and always touch and smell and feel. But there's no way to do that. In order to believe in a thing you've got to carry it with you. You cant carry the earth, or a man, in your pocket. I want a way to do that, carry things with me always, so I can believe in them. How clumsy to have to go to all the trouble of going out and bringing in something terribly physical to prove something. I hate physical things because they can be left behind and become impossible to believe in."

"I can only say that I looked at the page with my name under the title. By Joseph Hitchcock, But it was some other man. There was no way to prove-actually prove, really prove- that that man was me."

“I don’t know, Yes. No. It was wasn't going places. It was being between. Mostly it was space. So much space. I liked the idea of nothing on top, nothing on the bottom, and a lot of nothing in between, and me in the middle of the nothing.”

"All the gaps and space. And that's how I got to thinking about the stars. I thought how I'd like to be in a rocket ship, in space, in nothing, going on into nothing, with just a thin something, a thing eggshell of metal holding me, going on away from all the something with gaps in them that couldn't prove themselves. I knew then that the only happiness for me was space."