Cats of My Neighbours

BACKGROUND Creative writers such as Olivia Laing, Garth Greenwell and J Bryan Lowder have explored the relationship between sexuality, identity, visuality, representation, and space. This photo essay is informed by Laing’s readings of queerness as constituted through sight lines, e.g. looking, seeing and cruising, and equally enabled, constrained and characterised by urban conditions of density and isolation, focusing on works by writer-artists such as David Wojnarowicz. My essay enacts a response to my built environment. My research asks: how can a visual nonfiction form (the photo essay) complicate these vectors by incorporating multiple points of view and multiple timelines, reorganising the experiences of watching and being watched? CONTRIBUTION The research is located in the interplay between the position of photographer, the choice of object, and structure of the essay. Cats are a symbol of boundary-crossing but here are used to describe a boundary, rather than crossing one; the photographer observes the cats from a limited vantage, but also shapes material to define perspective (e.g. the artificial choice to exclude dogs or people, which of course I also see from my windows). In making a visual essay it contributes to the feedback loop of Laing’s work which uses an art of time (text) to describe arts of space (visual works). According to Laing, artefacts that emerge from the lonely city include ‘things forged in loneliness, but also things that function to redeem it.’ SIGNIFICANCE This essay was published in a special issue of AXON an internationally peer-reviewed journal on creativity and the creative process. It extends themes I have developed in book-length creative works THE ADVERSARY and SHIRLEY that are contracted to Penguin Random House and funded by the national and state-based bodies and has led to the development of creative and scholarly prose works under consideration (01/20) on the relationship between genre, form, sight and space.