Ryan Spencer
THERE IS NO LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL BECAUSE THE TUNNEL IS MADE OF LIGHT
The unfinished or unrealized work of art has special resonance; it holds the promise of what may have been, and we can fantasize about what final form it would have taken. We look for clues and form theories - it is forever a repository for individual and collective imagination. For Ryan Spencer, the 1996 album Black Love by the rock band The Afghan Whigs planted the seeds for such a conjecture.
As the legend goes, The Afghan Whigs front man, Greg Dulli was inspired by Prince’s Warner Brothers’ contract, which funded the film Purple Rain. Part of the Whigs contract for Black Love with Elektra stipulated that the label finance a feature length film produced and directed by Dulli. The music on the album, and even the photos in the liner notes, evoke the aesthetics of film noir; the search for truth is conflated with violence, sexual desire, paranoia, and self-destruction. In an interview at the time, Greg Dulli said that Black Love “is supposed to unravel cinematically, tell a story that unfolds as you’re listening to it.” As time went by, and the movie was never made, rumor begat the legend that the album was in some way a soundtrack for the unrealized film. From this concept Ryan Spencer set out to visualize what that film might look like, inspired by the neo-noir films which roughly began with Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, he sets his version of the “film” in Los Angeles. “I always thought of it unfolding as the suicide note of a doomed protagonist,” Spencer told Dana Steven in Aperture Magazine. “Sort of the way that Sunset Boulevard is told from the point of view of the narrator who we see floating dead in the pool.”
In the wake of riots, the Manson murders and the Vietnam War, the nature of noir and its protagonists had evolved, with gruff cynicism giving way to an almost nihilistic moral apathy. The protagonists, almost exclusively white men – detectives or police officers – operate with a cavalier sense of impunity. This rogue mentality was exemplified in law enforcement during the tenure of LAPD police chief Daryl Gates, culminating in the beating of Rodney King and the subsequent trial and riots of 1992. After photographing excerpts from these films with a Polaroid Land Camera, he assembled them into a narrative that was analogous to the eleven-song cycle of Black Love, reverse-engineering a storyboard for the movie that never was.
There is No Light at the End of the Tunnel Because the Tunnel Is Made of Light was published in Aperture Issue 231, "Film & Foto," 2018
There is No Light at the End of the Tunnel Because the Tunnel Is Made of Light published by TBW Books, March 12 2024
All photographs 2017
3.7 x 2.9 inches each
Unique panchromatic instant prints
The unfinished or unrealized work of art has special resonance; it holds the promise of what may have been, and we can fantasize about what final form it would have taken. We look for clues and form theories - it is forever a repository for individual and collective imagination. For Ryan Spencer, the 1996 album Black Love by the rock band The Afghan Whigs planted the seeds for such a conjecture.
As the legend goes, The Afghan Whigs front man, Greg Dulli was inspired by Prince’s Warner Brothers’ contract, which funded the film Purple Rain. Part of the Whigs contract for Black Love with Elektra stipulated that the label finance a feature length film produced and directed by Dulli. The music on the album, and even the photos in the liner notes, evoke the aesthetics of film noir; the search for truth is conflated with violence, sexual desire, paranoia, and self-destruction. In an interview at the time, Greg Dulli said that Black Love “is supposed to unravel cinematically, tell a story that unfolds as you’re listening to it.” As time went by, and the movie was never made, rumor begat the legend that the album was in some way a soundtrack for the unrealized film. From this concept Ryan Spencer set out to visualize what that film might look like, inspired by the neo-noir films which roughly began with Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, he sets his version of the “film” in Los Angeles. “I always thought of it unfolding as the suicide note of a doomed protagonist,” Spencer told Dana Steven in Aperture Magazine. “Sort of the way that Sunset Boulevard is told from the point of view of the narrator who we see floating dead in the pool.”
In the wake of riots, the Manson murders and the Vietnam War, the nature of noir and its protagonists had evolved, with gruff cynicism giving way to an almost nihilistic moral apathy. The protagonists, almost exclusively white men – detectives or police officers – operate with a cavalier sense of impunity. This rogue mentality was exemplified in law enforcement during the tenure of LAPD police chief Daryl Gates, culminating in the beating of Rodney King and the subsequent trial and riots of 1992. After photographing excerpts from these films with a Polaroid Land Camera, he assembled them into a narrative that was analogous to the eleven-song cycle of Black Love, reverse-engineering a storyboard for the movie that never was.
There is No Light at the End of the Tunnel Because the Tunnel Is Made of Light was published in Aperture Issue 231, "Film & Foto," 2018
There is No Light at the End of the Tunnel Because the Tunnel Is Made of Light published by TBW Books, March 12 2024
All photographs 2017
3.7 x 2.9 inches each
Unique panchromatic instant prints
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