![]() ![]() ![]() In this case, Vera took the photos during one of her fury-induced surveys of her property. Vera is Dillon’s aunt on his father’s side, and the essay opens, as many in this book do, with a few photos the piece will examine. This is the story Brian Dillon tells in one of the final essays of his newest book, Affinities: On Art and Fascination (2023). Her conviction stemmed from something more visceral than truth: an inherited anxiety about, among other unexplainable things, personal borders and boundaries, which manifested itself in an acute litigiousness for the physical space. The betrayal, of course, was only imagined. ![]() ![]() Like a discerning detective, Vera, the daughter of a policeman, spent an inordinate amount of time photographing her Dublin home and garden, capturing and calcifying for posterity what she was sure was evidence of her neighbors’ betrayal. She would send her brother out to the yard at night with a flashlight to inspect damage to her plants call and write letters to family members to complain about unneighborly mischief and deride police officers, priests, bus drivers, or anyone else in her way when they failed to support her mission to catch her neighbors in a transgression. VERA WAS “an impossible person.” She couldn’t shake the idea that something or someone, but particularly her neighbors on either side of her house, were out to get her. ![]()
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