Steve Cook’s
Alternity,
manifests possible pasts in mendacious but startlingly believable photographic images. These alternate narratives are strangely familiar, yet have a sense of disquiet as histories collide and memories blur. We understand the photograph's adventure derived from the co-presence of apparently irredeemably separate elements, but we also believe in their conflation. This is no dismissal of culture, merely a refusal to accept what others have said. In an age where notions of the importance of time dominate all areas of cultural exchange, there is inevitably a sense of anticipation and not a little neurosis. Cook seems to suggest that things aren't always what they seem and the past is maybe not what we thought it was. Is it possible to change the past, to make it different by seeing it through post-modern eyes?Roy Voss, London