Me, less than a year old, in a stroller on the edge of a liminal space in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania (1971).
A couple of weeks ago, Ashar and I were watching a stream of Eurogamer's Ian Higton as he played a new game called
Dreamcore. With the game as a jumping-off point, I learned a lot about
dreamcore itself (with a lowercase "d") and
backrooms. It's fascinating to see how Generation Z has embraced and adjusted the concept of
liminal spaces, creating works that feel both old and new. Their stories (urban legends, creepypasta, memes) and original art are intertwined with the
jarring 21st century events and technology that have shaped their lives thus far.
I grew up with fantasy books and movies about liminal spaces (though I certainly wasn't using that term). Two that spring immediately to mind are
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the 1978 movie
The Water Babies. I was a kid in various houses with cubbyholes, twisting staircases and unsettling attics and basements that fueled the imaginations of my friends and I, as we sought to transform the ordinary into something out of this world.
Now we have cottagecore, goblincore, dreamcore, weirdcore and countless other aesthetics contributing to the culture of younger generations. Additionally, for many of them, there is a deep nostalgia for roughly the period of 1995 to 2005. I won't dive more deeply into all of that, but since it's where this post began, here's a definition of
dreamcore from Aesthetics Wiki, a fasincating rabbit hole of a website you could lose yourself in:
"Dreamcore is a surrealist aesthetic that uses motifs commonly associated with dreams, daydreams or nightmares, portrayed through media such as images, videos and, on occasion, music." Dreamcore's "base images" often have lighter tones, even pastels, and can involve (but certainly aren't limited to) endlessly rolling hills, clouds, rainbows, bubbles, flowers and empty, nondescript buildings.
And then you have backrooms, or
The Backrooms, as the Wikipedia page labels it. There are many places to find the history of The Backrooms online (the lore runs
deep), but I really like how Austen Travis described them in
a 2023 blog post for Spirit Halloween:
"Previous, analog generations told scary stories like “The Hook” around campfires, but modern, digital generations spread online 'creepypasta', like Slenderman, Sirenhead, Ted the Caver, and now, the Backrooms. The Backrooms are an aesthetic and a horror story. Somehow instantly recognizable and inexplicably surreal, the Backrooms began as a labyrinth of yellow rooms and hallways. This seemingly-abandoned space is endless, dread-inducing, and weirdly nostalgic. The first image of the Backrooms, along with all the subsequent images that would appear online, resonate with both our past and our nightmares. ... The Backrooms live at the thematic intersection of creepy, nostalgic, sad, and surreal."
In
a review of Dreamcore (the game), Lewis Packwood discusses the overlap between dreamcore (the aesthetic) and The Backrooms: "It’s perhaps little surprise that liminal spaces have captured people’s imagination. Images of oddly empty offices and shopping malls were something we were all fascinated with during the COVID lockdowns of 2020, and although such images have always been unsettling, they are doubly so now in the wake of our collective trauma. But the Backrooms also arose directly from video game logic: the act of
‘no-clipping’, slipping beyond the world the player was intended to see. The aesthetic of repeating textures and echoing endless corridors is drawn straight from the gaming realm."
* * *
All of this got me to thinking a lot about photography, and specifically about the kind of photographs that
I enjoy taking and looking at. And there's a lot of thematic overlap. My favorite book of photographs is Stephen Shore's
Uncommon Places. Shore has an incredible eye for parking lots, hotel rooms, building exteriors, empty streets, crumbling places. The liminal spaces of America; the places that are more past than present. I think my photographic aesthetic and Shore's would both fit in very nicely with some of those that scare and stir Generation Z.
So, to close, here's a gallery of photos that sort of fit these themes (some better than others). All of these were taken by me, unless otherwise noted. Some of them have appeared on Papergreat previously, but seem a good fit for this post, too.
Ashar standing in front of both a computer screen and a wall-size photograph at a Titanic exhibit. It almost seems as if he could just walk right into that room.
Chests and luggage gathering dust in the attic of the house on Oak Crest Lane in Wallingford, Pennsylvania (probably taken by my grandmother).
One of my favorite photos, taken at an intersection in Dover Township, Pennsylvania.
First of two photos of the former LNP | LancasterOnline newsroom, emptied out by the pandemic. Here's
the full post.
Stairwell in the building at 8 West King in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
It's now just a memory.
Family photo that seems to be dated 1939. What lies beyond the door in the back?
Another family photo, circa 1985. I think Mom took this and it's at the house in Florida. Another mystery door in the background.
This is from the 1910s, probably taken by my great-grandfather. Unknown building. Possibly an armory, given the guard out front? This building looked old even then.
I suspect it's no longer standing. At least not in this dimension.
Parking lot of the Monroeville Mall, near Pittsburgh. Taken from my hotel room window. This was the original "dead" mall, as it was the shooting location for the 1978 movie
Dawn of the Dead. Now, tragically, it's a truly dead mall. Just days ago it was
officially sold to Walmart, which will likely renovate the property serve its own mindless-consumerism needs.
Dreamcore? An endless path within a York County cemetery.
This is a real photo! Snapped by me in a back alley in downtown Lancaster, Pennsylvania. How I lived to tell the tale, I do not know.
