TL;DR – I love rubbish First Doctor stories. I was on a car journey earlier this year heading to midlands with Mark Gatiss, Jon Dear and Chris Lincé. It was painfully early and we were on our way to hunt out some of the locations used in Lawrence Gordon Clark’s BBC Ghost Story for Christmas, The Signalman (1977). The conversation covered exactly what you’d have …| Celluloid Wicker Man
Part 16 Andy Warhol was far ahead of his time, in both the deathliness of his Polaroid portraits and in his use of the camera as a kitsch object. Other photographers found potential in similar Polaroid deathliness, but without such kitsch elements at play. Walker Evans in particular found a new dimension added to his own style of portraiture when he used the Polaroid rather …| Celluloid Wicker Man
Part 15 We are the Goon Squad and we’re coming to town When David Bowie died in 2016, it felt for a moment like someone had removed a piece of my spine. The feeling was a mixture of frustration, at having only fully appreciated the musician’s work later in life, and worry, at having relied on his work to get me through my own on …| Celluloid Wicker Man
Part 14 My second memory concerning a Polaroid photo appearing in pop culture was one taken by a maniac. This maniac had hitched a ride from some naïve teenagers in the sweltering outback of Texas and was freaking them out with his variety of macabre hobbies. He’d just visited the local slaughterhouse before they picked him up. He didn’t work there. He just liked it. …| Celluloid Wicker Man
Part 13 Easy Riders, Cops and Maniacs A man is stood in a pool hall. He’s surveying the green baize landscape as he drinks. Should he bother with the game anymore? The light has a medicinal quality, emanating with an annoying buzz from a long halogen strip above the table, proudly advertising Canada Dry ginger beer. It could be a lonely portrait by Walker Evans …| Celluloid Wicker Man
Part 11 Not all memories are as sacred as Tarkovsky’s. If time can be expressed in photos taken by the public at drunken parties, then it can certainly present in work by other artists, even those driven by less transcendental aims than Tarkovsky. Considering this, the first body of work that comes to mind is that of the American photographer William Eggleston. The Tennessee photographer …| Celluloid Wicker Man
Part 10 Over time, we become strangers to ourselves in Polaroids. We take them, not to create memories, but to help retain them. Sometimes this is unnecessary. At other times, it is essential if we want to remember moments in our lives. This is an idea realised perfectly in Christopher Nolan’s debut feature, Memento (2000). It is a film that essentially sits on the cusp …| Celluloid Wicker Man
Part 9 In 1859, the Harvard poet and medical professor Oliver Wendell Holmes described photography in a much earlier guise as being a ‘mirror with a memory.’ One aspect lost in this oft-quoted soun…| Celluloid Wicker Man
Adam Scovell’s third novel is loosely based on his own memories of growing up on the Wirral, Merseyside, and, through his usual mix of prose and photographic fragments, examines how a place a…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
