From Amazon.com
In their previous collaboration
Lights Out for the Territory, Marc Atkins's few dark, brooding photographs focused writer Iain Sinclair's dense, impressionistic formulations about London, the city he loves to drift through. Here Atkins's penetrating black-and-white portraits and his beautiful, troubling shots of a London we forget we know dominate. Sinclair contributes essays in a lighter, more journalistic prose than readers of his wonderful, overwrought novels might expect. In them he discusses Atkins, or one of his photographs, and their mutual project of attempting to pin down London's story. And he writes about other writers (Peter Ackroyd, Michael Moorcock, John Healy) who share his fascination with one of the world's great cities. As the title of their book suggests, it is nearly impossible to articulate absolute truths about a space as dynamic as this city, and equally difficult to hold a fixed position on it. Despite that (Sinclair praises his friend for creating flux whereas his writing tries to "mould wriggling chaos"), the pair's project is worthwhile, as it has produced words and some remarkable pictures that only such a troubled engagement could create. This is a visual feast of contemporary photojournalism, in which Atkins's visions and Sinclair's words help the reader perceive a London that can easily be walked past daily without a second glance.
--Mark Thwaite, Amazon.co.uk
From Library Journal
Freelance photographer Atkins and Sinclair, author of Downriver and Radon Daughters, portray, through words and photographs, a London few visitors would ever want to see. This is a dark, downtrodden, dirty, and damp London of canals, riverside factories, cemetery monuments, and people who match the scenery. The textAshort essays, poems, and conversationsAis less about the places photographed than about the various people Atkins and Sinclair met on their rambles on the fringes of the city. The photographs, all black-and-white, are only occasionally interesting and provocative, and the fragmented narrative wanders. For comprehensive photography collections only.ALinda M. Kaufmann, Massachusetts Coll. of Liberal Arts Lib., North Adams
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
