In recent years, this idea of pulling photographs above the waterline has become increasingly important. In 2008 he began work on two series that have formed the foundation of his current practice; the first, Ibiza Mistakes, which mutilated and then reconstructed the Ibiza portraits, came about the year his daughter Sorcha was born, the first year since 1993 that he didn’t go Balearic.
Penniless at the time, he began printing the portraits at home on a second-rate printer. They came out lined and faded, the ink spread irregularly across the surface. It was a Damascene moment. Realising “they said more than the original photograph”, he trialled other lo-fi methods such as using photocopiers and pharmacy labs, and the discoveries he made propelled him in new directions. In God & Man, he took humdrum, low-res, internet-sourced images, re-photographed them and then double-exposed them onto Kodachrome film. The title refers to Kodachrome’s inventors, Leopold Godowsky & Leopold Mannes, who were affectionately known as ‘God and Man’.
His most recent book, Close Your Eyes (the handmade artist edition of which was named one of BJP’s books of the year in 2013, and was last month published in a trade version of 1000 copies by SPBH Editions) took the idea even further, and his back catalogue became a hunting ground for further creative transformation. “I’d been messing around with this work for years,” he tells me. “Really, you have all this stuff and you’re trying to work out why you spent years of your life doing it.”
Unlike his previous series, which he admits were sometimes torturously long in the making, Close Your Eyes came together in a week in his living room. “There was a lot of fannying about leading up to it – my partner thinks I’m a mental case because all I did for years and years was sit at a computer screen and move pictures about,” he says. “But this time, I just went ‘bosh’ – I didn’t even make contacts.”
