Synkroniciti is excited to welcome back photographer Jason Baldinger of Pennsylvania with three photographs exploring imagery we find in dreams. Longtime Synkroniciti readers remember Jason’s marvelous cover for our “Broken” issue, a dreamlike image of an empty square in Point Pleasant, WV, presided over by an analog clock devoid of hands. The photos in this issue are taken looking into windows from the outside, creating a landscape that combines primary image with reflection, juxtaposing the worlds on either side of the glass in a disorienting fashion.
Pottstown, PA is eerie. The interior view is strange by itself; a skeleton rides a wooden horse, similar to one you might see on a carousel, mounted on a table base. The skeleton waves an American flag. The upper portion of the frame is invaded and dominated by the exterior view, a tree, street and large building. The tree, in particular, creates distortion, making the skeletal rider look more ghostly and ephemeral. I am put in mind of Paul Revere’s ride gone macabre, a commentary on modern American nationalism which has lost the patriotic sense of community.
Hagerstown, MD is an uplifting vision, looking in the window of the Hagerstown Aviation Museum. This celebration of flight is complicated to decipher–what is primary image and what is reflection? Planes hang midair among clouds–which are possibly painted–and the ceiling is oddly superimposed and joined to the scene, as if one of the planes, looking rather like an immense wasp, had torn through it to liberate its comrades. Jason’s use of optical illusion to create this story is masterful.
Finally, Jamestown, NY has a more somber, yet uncanny, tone. We see four mannequins, most likely female, inside a screened window, the small squares of the screen intimating that these mannequins are prisoners. Although they are headless, one of them appears to be staring in our direction. The reflection of a line of trees falls ominously across their bodies and a white chain runs down on the left inside the window. In my mind this evokes the struggles of women: silenced, unprotected, threatened. It makes me want to help them.
Jason’s images have so much power and there is more than one way to interpret them, depending on what you bring to the work. View them in Synkroniciti’s “Dreams” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Jason Baldinger is a poet and photographer from Pittsburgh, PA. He is the co-editor of Trailer Park Quarterly and co-runs The Odd-Month Reading Series. He’s penned twenty books of poetry the newest of which include, American Aorta (OAC Books) and Waiting on Hummingbirds with Kansas poet James Benger (Their fourth together). His first book of photography, Lazarus (OAC Books), was released in 2023.
His photography can also be found in the ekphrastic collaboration, Hope is a Prison with poet Rebecca Schumejda (OAC Books), and The Night Window (Kung Fu Treachery). His poems and photos have appeared across a wide variety of online sites and print journals.
You can hear him read from various books on Bandcamp and on lps by The Gotobeds and Theremonster.