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The earliest one that I can date
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or have a go at dating
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seems actually quite a few years prior
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to the ones of George Dryer
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are the ones of Colin MacInnes
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in only that he looks quite young, must be early 50s.
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So from the full set,
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I can't trace it whether they were actually used
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or whether they were commissioned by Vogue
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or for another magazine.
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I dunno if they were ever used.
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So there's a double exposure
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of Colin MacInnes looking in a suit very like I must say,
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the man in blue
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or the businessman series of Bacon paintings.
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And then the other one of Colin MacInnes is interesting
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because more sort of correctly, I suppose,
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to say multiple exposure.
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And then this one is a multiple,
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this looks like three, potentially four,
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but I think three images there.
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And the fact that this image seems to work
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perhaps suggests a degree of skill
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in the positioning and the lighting
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and allowing the exposure to be balanced.
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Well I was gonna ask about how aware
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you think he was of other photographers.
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Of surrealist photographers, of people who were working with
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those kind of manipulations, because he's also quite often
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presented as, if not perhaps a naive photographer,
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as somebody who's kind of working as a kind of maverick.
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Yeah.
And also he was working
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as a commercial photographer.
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So this kind of link to more artistic photography
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is something which is interesting
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when we are looking at these manipulated images.
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Yeah, the arc of his artistic learning really,
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I suppose, took off when he became associated
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with Arthur Jeffress.
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He was a bright young thing.
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Millionaire, playboy, international playboy.
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They had a fairly sophisticated lifestyle
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especially for the pre-war years,
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going to The Bahamas and New York
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and Mexico and Venice, living a kind of high life
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and acquiring pictures and paintings.
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He had a painting show in 1938
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that by all accounts was well received.
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Very strange, sort of like really heavy impasto paintings
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that look very indebted to Ruo.
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Some people say that he found a camera at a party
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and picked it up and that's how he started photographing.
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But I think we can say that he picked up an awareness
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of the variety of techniques of photography
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through a really interesting photographer
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called Barbara Ker-Seymer, who had her own studio
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and worked photographing kind of society people
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that she was connected to, for instance, of Nancy Cunard
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and various painters.
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And she liked experimenting with ideas
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that she picked up from European trends in photography,
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for instance, from Man Ray and Kurdish
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and liked using solarized kind of techniques
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in her society portraits.
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I discovered a direct connection
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to Deakin in the Barbara Ker-Seymer records
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and the archives that they hold at tape.
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Deakin actually features them on really many pages.
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The potential for Deakin, picking up an awareness of
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how you could function as a photographer,
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what techniques you might use,
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what were the latest trends coming from Europe,
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how you could play with the manner
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and the equipment is, I suppose there's a really direct hint
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that Barbara Ker-Seymer played
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a significant part in that process.
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She photographed him
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and she turns up in a photograph album
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that contains photographs of Deakin
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and a photograph of a person called Rosemary McCall
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in a double exposure.
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So whether Deakin took this double exposure
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or Barbara Ker-Seymer is difficult to say.
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There are photographs by Deakin in the album stamped on the
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back with his photographer stamp from
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before the war, which shows that he thought
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of himself seriously enough to have a stamp made.
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You know, he had a painting show in 1938.
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By 1939 he'd had a photography stamp made.
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So he had started photography and had started a studio
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and then the eruption of the Second World War
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displaced everything.
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During the war, he worked for the Army Film
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and Photographic Unit
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where all sorts of techniques and tricks
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and things like that would've been, if not taught,
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at least picked up.
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'Cause the teaching was actually fairly unformalized
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as far as I can understand it.
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Do you think the double exposure sits
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with any particular explored trail of surrealism?
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You know, because it's quite late really, isn't it,
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for people to be engaging with surrealistic ideas.
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But they were young men at the time when surrealism
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was really exploding and was, I suppose was the new,
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what might be the most interesting sphere
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of art from the late 20s and 30s.
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But you know, this is going into the 50s and 60s.
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Do you think there was still a lot
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of playing around with surrealism?
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Do you think that's what this is?
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I think this certainly was in terms
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of commercial photography
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and also that surrealism carried on in all sorts
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of other places outside of Paris for a long time.
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I mean, well into the 1960s in say Czechoslovakia
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or even in the United States
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where there are other photographers
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that are using these kind of techniques.
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I mean I suppose it would've been fairly,
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not quite old fashioned yet,
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but it would've been a little bit off trend
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to being presenting yourself as a surrealist.
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Which I don't think is what's happening here,
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but you can certainly relate it back to some of
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that earlier material.
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One of the original ideas
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that interested me when I started looking at the double
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exposures was where they sit in the grander scheme
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of modernism and 20th century art.
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Some of the key painters when they were photographed would
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appear as a double exposure.
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So for instance, there's double exposures of Max Ernst.
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There are double exposures of Picasso,
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there are double exposures of T.S. Eliot,
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there are double exposures of Duchamp.
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The earliest one I can find actually is
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for Degas the painter,
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where he's photographed in the double exposure.
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So it seems like perhaps when photographers are looking
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for some way to express the all seeing genius of characters,
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perhaps more famous artists
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that have a personality in the public eye,
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that the double exposure seems to fit in a fairly consistent
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and universal way when they want to allude to, you know,
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explosive creative potential of their artistic mind,
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that it's not contained by one solid face.
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They need multiple exposures to illustrate the breadth
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and the depth of their thinking
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or the complicated identity of the creative.
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It seems to me really fascinating
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that Picasso actually generated his own double exposures
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and used them as the basis to generate works.
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Picasso actually photographed Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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in front of a Rousseau painting.
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So there was a portrait on top of a painting,
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photographed them separately
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and then superimpose 'em on on top of each other.
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'Cause it seems to be fairly literal to the degree
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that makes me suspicious of it.
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The fact that that double exposure, you know, in the way,
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particularly of these portraits,
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that they are the same subject in the same room
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at the same moment, but just moved slightly.
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And that's really does seem
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to be almost like a literal jump there into
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the multiple planes of cubism, the different angles,
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but all on the same viewpoint.
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Yeah, I mean,
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if we think about what picture making does,
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about pictorial representation,
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that it is taking a world which is not flat
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and making it into a flat image.
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What enables you to do that is this kind
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of freezing of time.
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So it gets rid of all sorts of other aspects out
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of the picture, so to speak.
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So the double exposure kind of allows you to bring back
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that element of time
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and to represent things from different angles
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and to represent different states within a singular image.