JG Ballard: The David Bowie of the Motorways
Author: Simon Sellars • Aug 19th, 2005 •Category: Ballardosphere, photography, speed & violence
I tracked down the cover of the JGB book in the ‘Contemporary British Novelists’ series (see post below). It’s interesting the image they used: a motorway overpass. This has become the default Ballard image, hasn’t it? Of course I use similar images myself on this site. It’s strongly linked to Crash, I’m guessing, which would make that the book of his that’s most embedded in the collective consciousness. Does anyone agree?
The amount of times people choose a motorway or an overpass or a road of some sort to visually represent Ballard’s work is staggering. I did it subconsciously, but when I think about it, Crash does resonate with me more than say Empire or even the later works, like Millennium.
I recall obsessively photographing freeways and crashed cars and airports after reading Crash for the first time about 12 years ago; it’s such a potent psychological image, totally attuned to the times, but I wonder how JGB feels about it so many years after Crash has been published?
Isn’t a bit like Bowie being constantly typified as the bisexual, glam space alien he was 30 years ago when now he all wants to be known as is a smooth, heterosexual, happily married crooner?
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I think it’s an easy shorthand for Ballard, but not one that necessarily represents the content of his thought in any fair way. It could just as well represent Ian Sinclair, even though most of his work is about London, and not just the M25.
Ballard talks about his feels re Crash in an interview with Will Self, republished in Self’s Junk Mail. Interesting that he himself has never reread the book since the manuscript was finalised.
I consider myself guilty as well, had the same rambles, though more after reading concrete island..
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22652918@N00/34165469/in/pool-jg_ballard/
when browsing the flickr ballard group pictures there is some other ballardian iconography that stands out. I’m thinking of pictures like
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ann3n3/30983165/in/pool-jg_ballard/
which reminds me somehow of some of the subtle paranoiac short stories, and in a way resembles imagery like on the american cover of supercannes.
But somehow this is a more ungraspable (and therefore more interesting?) kind of pics
The mistake (in my view) a lot of people make in this respect is to think of all rundown places or cars or highrises as being ballardian, while to me it is more a sort of tension between brand new and abandoned.
what’s interesting: no people, ever! (only cars)
how about this terminal beach
http://www.flickr.com/photos/soul72/10524687/