Architecture expresses the zeitgeist, Mollica adds, and skyscrapers are designed to convey power, solidity, and permanence. Their glassy exteriors are also quite literally flashy, reflecting lights and the sun; they are alienating too, sealing off scenes into views which can be surveyed but not touched, tasted, smelt, or heard. Of course this description can also fit photographs, and Moon City also evokes the medium, one shot showing a strip of office windows redolent of a strip of negatives. Mollica likes the comparison but says it was an accident – or maybe unconscious – and is unwilling to over-explain. He’d rather leave audience space to interpret, he says, room to draw their own conclusions.
His layout is deliberately open, each spread oscillating between the city and the moon; Moon City includes essays by Iain Sinclair and Brad Feuerhelm which offer subjective, allusive riffs rather than straight information. Mollica enjoys the title Sinclair has given his text, Collision Course, and says it describes the whole book. “There is this duality, a complex relationship I tried to lay out,” he says. “There is dialogue, I try to maintain freedom for the viewer.” His interpretation is bound up in his sense of the intuitive, pre-rational understanding of the city, in his idea that we can all see what’s going on, if we take the time to really look. “I’m not an economist, I don’t have a degree in global economic or geopolitical whatever, but me as a normal human being, I have my sensitivity, my degree of knowledge,” he says.
In fact for him photography can be a way to focus in, and to gain insight by doing so; photography is intimately bound up with colonialism and extraction, he adds, but it can also be something else. He points to artists such as Anders Petersen, whose images are subjective and particular, showing moments – and viewpoints – that can’t be repeated or compared. “My hope is that photography can be a means to engage,” says Mollica. “I’m not an intellectual so I wouldn’t know if this is relevant, pertinent, or correct. But this is what I feel.”
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