Pinhole experiments

Notes: It is proving extremely difficult and time consuming to get an accurately exposed shot from the pinsta camera. The camera only uses sight lines for composition, it throws out a really wide depth of field, apparently it likes being placed on the floor. Pre-flashing with a 1000 lumen flashlight for 30 seconds saves a significant amount of time when exposing. For the bridge for instance I placed the camera on the ground very near to the edge of the bank but it still picked up a lot of foreground. Because of the nature of filmless photography the image comes out in reverse. For the image of the tree we used a tripod between 2-3ft high and because the light was really bright I did not pre-flash and I set the paper speed at 3 (the light affects the paper speed i.e low/poor light 1, strong light 3, bright light sunny day 6), we exposed for 2 minutes and the image as you can see is over exposed.

Brontë Bridge, f229, speed 1, pre-flashed, exposure time 7 minutes
Penistone Hill, f229, speed 3, tripod, not pre-flashed, exposure time 2 minutes

Iain Sinclair and Psychogeography

“Iain Sinclair’s classic early text, Lud Heat, explores mysterious cartographic connections between the six Hawksmoor churches in London. In a unique fusion of prose and poetry, Sinclair invokes the mythic realm of King Lud, who according to legend was one of the founders of London, as well as the notion of psychic ‘heat’ as an enigmatic energy contained in many of its places. The book’s many different voices, including the incantatory whispers of Blake and Pound, combine in an amalgamated shamanic sense that somehow works to transcend time. The transmogrifying intonations and rhythms slowly incorporate new signs, symbols and sigils into the poem that further work on the senses. This was the work that set the ‘psychogeographical’ tone for much of Sinclair’s mature work, as well as inspiring novels like Hawksmoor and Gloriana from his peers Peter Ackroyd and Michael Moorcock, and Alan Moore’s From Hell.”

“In 1841 the poet John Clare fled an asylum in Epping Forest and walked eighty miles to his home in Northborough. He was searching for his lost love, Mary Joyce – a woman three years dead …In 2000 Iain Sinclair set out to recreate Clare’s walk away from madness. He wanted to understand his bond with the poet and escape the gravity of his London obsessions. Accompanied on this journey by his wife Anna (who shares a connection with Clare), the artist Brian Catling and magus Alan Moore – as well as a host of literary ghosts, both visionary and romantic – Sinclair’s quest for Clare becomes an investigation into madness, sanity and the nature of the poet’s muse.”

“Dining on Stones is Iain Sinclair’s sharp, edgy mystery of London and its environs Andrew Norton, poet, visionary and hack, is handed a mysterious package that sees him quit London and head out along the A13 on an as yet undefined quest. Holing up in a roadside hotel, unable to make sense of his search, he is haunted by ghosts: of the dead and the not-so dead; demanding wives and ex-wives; East End gangsters; even competing versions of himself. Shifting from Hackney to Hastings and all places in-between, while dissecting a man’s fractured psyche piece by piece, Dining on Stones is a puzzle and a quest – for both writer and reader.”

Text reproduced from Amazon and World of Books (accessed 14/11/24)

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The New York Trilogy is perhaps the most astonishing work by one of America’s most consistently astonishing writers. The Trilogy is three cleverly interconnected novels that exploit the elements of standard detective fiction and achieve a new genre that is all the more gripping for its starkness. It is a riveting work of detective fiction worthy of Raymond Chandler, and at the same time a profound and unsettling existentialist enquiry in the tradition of Kafka or Borges. In each story the search for clues leads to remarkable coincidences in the universe as the simple act of trailing a man ultimately becomes a startling investigation of what it means to be human. The New York Trilogy is the modern novel at its finest: a truly bold and arresting work of fiction with something to transfix and astound every reader.
Text reproduced from https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/the-new-york-trilogy-paul-auster (accessed 14/10/24)