In Ingrid Black's The Dark Eye, Saxon begins to read a book containing a collection of photographs taken by Felix Berg. On the title page is an epigraph by Baudelaire, which, translated, reads: "Swarming city, city full of dreams, where a ghost in daylight clutches a passer-by!" To Saxon, this sums up perfectly what Berg had tried to portray in his photographs:
"They were cityscapes mainly, street scenes, shot in black and white, but with occasional splashes of colour for effect or contrast. And they were cities I knew well, or thought I'd known well before then........he made them all seem alien. And what made them stranger still were the figures who inhabited them.
...He had taken multiple shots of the same street at different times of day and night and then superimposed the pictures over one another endlessly until one would lose count and there was layer upon layer of these strange figures inhabiting the same space, getting in each other's way, but always unaware of one another's very presence, until the image became so faded and crowded that the figures were insubstantial as phantoms -- ghosts in the daylight clutching at passers-by -- and you could see he stones of the city through their bones and skin.
The photographs were simultaneously tranquil and hectic. On one level, the city itself became the only reality, the still point in the turning world, and on another level my head ached with the multiplicity of images, presences, lives, all clashing and conflicting with one another in a mad claustrophobia which made you realise as you looked at them how crowded and insane a city was, who lives jostled and ground against one another without ceasing, even when they were unaware of doing so, and how nothing was ever really your own, everything had been claimed before, everywhere had been occupied and reoccupied repeatedly.
You were just there on sufferance till the next person took your place, and the next one took their place, and the next theirs, in endless disconnected uncaring succession."
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