Focal Point - Dr. Philip Charrier – Journey

In July 2022 I presented a paper on the French thinker Georges Bataille at a conference in Spain. The subject was Bataille’s early 1955 musings on the possibility of global nuclear annihilation and his ideas on how humanity urgently needed to alter course. The situation Bataille faced in the early Cold War era shares many commonalities with the current climate crisis and the renewed threat of nuclear war. I wrote much of the paper on a long train journey from Finland to the conference venue in Spain. Along the way I looked at the world through Bataille’s eyes, as something beautiful that is on the point of being lost. These photographs were made with those eyes.

-Dr. Philip Charrier