{"id":631,"date":"2009-04-20T13:43:07","date_gmt":"2009-04-20T13:43:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=631"},"modified":"2009-04-20T13:43:07","modified_gmt":"2009-04-20T13:43:07","slug":"ballard-dies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=631","title":{"rendered":"Ballard Dies"},"content":{"rendered":"

There have probably been relatively few famous inhabitants of Shepperton, a small suburban corner of Middlesex within spitting distance of where I live, but unquestionably J G Ballard <\/a>who died on Sunday, age 78, was one of them.<\/p>\n

Certainly one of Britains major post-war writers, James Graham Ballard <\/em>saw the future embodied in the present culture, and wrote his own apocalyptic ‘Ballardian’ version of it, based strongly around the outer suburbs where he – and I – live. He clearly foresaw the surveillance society and many of the problems of late capitalism.<\/p>\n

Best known for his ‘Empire of the Sun<\/em>‘, a superbly written work based around his experiences as a child in the Japanese internment camps in China and made into a film, it was his other works which are more important, perhaps culminating in his last novel, Kingdom Come <\/em>(2006), firmly set in the suburban zone around the M25. In many ways close to home.<\/p>\n

It was a great disappointment to me that the film ‘Crash<\/em>‘ was\u00a0 migrated by its Canadian director to Toronto.\u00a0 The book was very firmly set in the Heathrow area, and, although I’m not sure it would have been a better film in West London\/Middlesex, it would certainly have added to its relevance for me.<\/p>\n

I wrote briefly about him and his work, and how it had inspired some of my own photography in ‘Under The Car<\/a>‘, based on a section of a lecture I gave in 2007 in Brasilia.<\/p>\n

\"\u00a9
\nA Ballardian landscape \u00a9 Peter Marshall<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There have probably been relatively few famous inhabitants of Shepperton, a small suburban corner of Middlesex within spitting distance of where I live, but unquestionably J G Ballard who died on Sunday, age 78, was one of them. Certainly one of Britains major post-war writers, James Graham Ballard saw the future embodied in the present … Continue reading Ballard Dies<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-own-work","category-political-issues"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}