‘Up and down; in and out’ (2020—2023): Photographs and collaged derivations of the Strand—most assembled during the Covid-19 lockdowns—explore not merely a district but a zone of psychic overdetermination. The Strand, long traversed as a conduit rather than inhabited as a place, is one of London’s most charged Symbolic sites. Its recent partial pedestrianisation interrupts its function as passage, opening a space where the Imaginary flattens and the Real leaks through: movement, desolation, repetition, eruption. This is not a cartography of nostalgia but an articulation of subjective inscription—my first surgery was here; it is, in a sense, where I began to be written. These images, many of which were published online to mark LGBTQ+ History Month in February 2021, do not simply document a street. They stage the gaze—both the subject’s and the Other’s—framing the Strand not as backdrop but as the scene of an encounter: with self, city, and the limits of representation. See: https://www.strandlines.london/2021/02/12/strandlines-by-nora-geist/. Cameras used: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z5–>iPhone 7. *Click on each thumbnail to view the larger picture with details.
