This photograph was taken on the same evening that I photographed the lights of the traffic on Manchester Road reflected in the slime of a slug travelling slowly across the wall more or less directly beneath this sign. I was listening to Raga Shuddh Kalyan – Khyal in Vilambit Teental by Kishori Amonkar on my phone and starting to think about the musical project that I eventually realised as ‘Bismillah in the House of Dreams’, which no one has listened to (‘no one’ in this context meaning ‘very few people’). The slug and reflected traffic lights experience was the more impressive spectacle but the representation of the spectacle did not do justice to the experience, which suggests something interesting about the nature of sight, the part it can play in generating emotional experience, and the inability of photographs to reproduce the reality of sight born emotion, although skilled photographers are sometimes capable of transmitting emotion through tapping into the typical range of emotional responses that viewers are capable of. For me, this photograph is linked to the slug and traffic light experience, and everything that goes with it. For you, that cannot be the case, even though I have outlined what happened on that evening. And even if you had seen the slug, you might not have noticed the lights reflected on its body.
Sheffield Patrol Group 