This photograph of a clown lost and despondent in a sea of urban waste is a picture of the end of a dream. It is a picture about doubt, lost ideals, helplessness, and ultimately of a timely realisation. The clown is both an alien and alienated figure in this strange environment – an icon of superfluity. Clowns are largely redundant figures these days anyway, and in the context and scale of this vast wasteground landscape, even more so. Because this clown is also the artist and author of the work, John Isaacs, the photograph is also both a self-deprecating self-portrait and a sardonic comment on the contemporary role of the artist as an outmoded and ineffectual entertainer. An utterly impotent, defeated and ridiculous figure, the clown here takes on the mantle of the dreamer, the idealist, the fantasist and the child that we all once were. The child who believed in fairytales and Santa Claus and also, Isaacs suggests – in a better world than the one which we have inherited. The clown is all this and more. A traditional figure of fun, he is here a tragic figure confronted and belittled by the consumerist mess that is the unfortunate but unavoidable reality of today’s modern Western world.

Made in 1998, this photograph is a portrait of its time: a portrait of the end of the twentieth century. It is also a portrait of the end of Romanticism and all its associated idealism, articulated in a way that uses the very same pictorial language of the Romantic movement – namely that of the Romantic landscape. With its stark contrast of a lone figure contemplating the vast horizon of his surroundings, this photograph both echoes and parodies the established pictorial tradition in modern art. Depicting a confrontation between the individual and the universal, it is a tradition that ultimately attempts to articulate the psychology of the human condition and man’s mystic notion of the sublime.

Isaacs’ photograph mimics one of the earliest and best known of all Romantic landscape paintings, Caspar David Friedrich’s epic and almost abstract Monk by the Sea of 1809. Friedrich painted himself in the clothes of a monk wandering alone along the empty shoreline contemplating the sublime mystery of the void as represented by the seemingly infinite expanse of the sky and the horizon. Donning the costume of a clown, Isaacs too presents himself as a lone figure contemplating the immensity of the void. However, Isaacs’ void is far more mundane and down to earth. It is the tangible and very material void of late twentieth-century consumer ennui. A void made up not by the unfathomable mysteries of God’s creation but by the ugly waste-products of man’s.

Although there is often a pervasive and provocative streak of social criticism underpinning much of Isaacs’ work, the artist is not preaching, he is investigating human responses to the problems of the world. A world which we all know about but appear powerless to change. This photograph is as much a portrait of the individual’s sense of powerlessness as it is a social critique. It is part of a series of works that Isaacs has made in a variety of media appropriately entitled The Incomplete History of Unknown Discovery.

It is the open-endedness and innate ambiguity of meaning in Isaacs’ works that often gives many of his images their power to resonate in the viewer’s mind long after they have been seen. Although its subject matter seems to represent a dramatic contrast between the romantic individual and the vast collective whole, there is also an unspoken connection that exists between the clown and the rubbish tip. Both are redundant elements of human society. The depressed clown is in his own way as much a waste-product of modern society as the detritus that fills this panoramic scene. In this way, the image presents both a contrast and a communion, and because of this ambiguity, we are left free by the image to project our own meaning and interpretation onto this strange, memorable and ultimately silent encounter. While, for Isaacs’, the figure of the clown is clearly a self-deprecating dig at himself in his tragi-comic role as artist. The clown and the artist’s position as outsider can also be seen as an Everyman or a modern-day Atlas crushed by the weight of his responsibility. It is both an answer to Bruce Nauman’s torturing clowns and as a day of awakening for Ronald McDonald. And in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre, it could also be seen as an evocative and gruesome echo of the scene at Ground Zero. Essentially what Isaacs presents in this work is a mental landscape that serves as an expression for a specific, recognisable but perhaps unexplainable psychological state of mind. Like the Surrealists’ celebrated chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on the dissecting table, the bizarre encounter presented in this photograph makes use of simple visual metaphor to articulate a sense of the universal and collective poetry of the human soul.