unexpected encounters #6: exit
The error of the Surrealist militants was to imagine the surreal to be something universal, that is, a matter of psychology, whereas it turns out to be what is most local, ethnic, class-bound, dated ... Believing that the images they sought came from the unconscious, whose contents they assumed as loyal Freudians to be timeless as well as universal, the Surrealists misunderstood what was most brutally moving, irrational, unassimilable, mysterious—time itself. What renders a photograph surreal is its irrefutable pathos as a message from time past, and the concreteness of its intimations about social class.
Susan Sontag, On Photography
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Fantasy Land Hotel, West Edmonton Mall, Edmonton, Canada
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The text is taken from the website for Fantasy Land Hotel in West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton, Alberta, whose "one-of-a-kind luxurious themed rooms" include the Roman Room, the Polynesian Room, the Modern Igloo, the African Room, and the Truck Room (where you can recreate the moment you lost your virginity in the bed of a pickup truck). Some might think Fantasy Land a disturbingly accurate guide to the modern world as seen from a settler colony. West Ed, as the locals call it, long held the record for the largest shopping mall in the world.
I stumbled across the happy couple exchanging vows beneath the exit sign in a different shopping mall, in Washington D.C. As that merciless chronicler of the extra in the ordinary, Diane Arbus, once famously said, one of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed. Especially when we all have our hi-res camera phones to freeze time into image, which accompany us everywhere we go.