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2025 Review

As tradition dictates, the following is a round-up of all the year’s viewing, reading and working. 2025 has been a somewhat tricky year and I’ve decided to not be quite so exhaustive in writing up the detail of my viewing in particular, not least because the quality of films has been somewhat lower than previous years. Juggling the requirements of my work with a few big changes personally, the…

Trailer - J.G. Ballard's Crash (Thames Television 1974)

Around eight years ago, I made my first “fake trailer”. Partly in response to Ben Wheatley’s (and Amy Jump’s) adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise, which I felt somewhat missed the mark, I edited together a “what if” trailer for the book if it had been adapted for BBC television in 1975. The responses to it, along with those to a follow up trailer (looking at what a 1970s adaptation of Derek…

The Kaleidoscopic Past of the Counter-Culture Years

By the time I was growing up in the 1990s, the previous decades of the Post-War years had been heavily codified. The 1950s were very much the 1950s; the 1970s were very much the 1970s, and even the 1980s – the decade I was born in the last year of – were very much the 1980s. The BBC in particular milked this realisation for all it was worth with an endless slew of “I Heart the 1970s” and “Sounds…

Hartnell Greys

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 expected from anyone who knows any…

Local Haunts (Influx Press, 2025)

Local Haunts was released at the end of March by Influx Press, and has been on sale for around two months at the time of writing. I’ve resisted talking more about it on here so far, largely because I wanted to see what the general reaction was rather than pre-empting it. Thankfully, after having done a number of events in which the response has been positive, I thought I’d now write a few words…

Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 17)

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 than his 35mm, the…

Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 16)

2024 Review

Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 15)

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. His Polaroid camera…

Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 14)

Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 13)

Part 12 Scrying ‘Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die’, wrote Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian, ‘it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is not what I seek.’ I think of this often. The room was hazy yellow with dreary sunlight. Rays of summer drifted lazily through the air. I’d been contemplating the window through which this light came through for a fair…

Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 12)

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 was…

Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 11)

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 of the digital…

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Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 10)

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 soundbite by the noted medical reformer was that he was discussing photography as explicitly producing an object. It is the photograph that is the mirror because the viewer can look and see their likeness…

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Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 9)

Part 8 Souvenirs The past is dangerously addictive. Nostalgia, especially second-hand nostalgia such as mine, often threatens to become an endless placebo in place of living. How alluring the past seems when we convince ourselves of having experienced it for a brief moment through culture and art. The ghost story writer M.R. James lived with this addiction to the past more than most. James…

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Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 8)

Part 7 Remembering Afterimage ‘At times,’ the Nobel Laureate and novelist Patrick Modiano writes, ‘it seems, our memories act much like Polaroids.’ This interesting thought comes from the semi-autobiographical perspective of a character in his novella Afterimage (1993). It is a narrative filled with strangeness, derived in part from the recollection of memories once forgotten; put to one side,…

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Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 7)

Part 6 Time and again, cinema seems drawn to Polaroid photography, often in unusual and tangential ways. Antonioni’s film, even if ultimately about 35mm photography, is not the only one to explore the strangely tangible qualities of space within photography (or the things contained within a photograph beyond the image). When looking at Polaroids, we perceive them spatially. By that I mean we…

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