LIQUID CITY_ excerpts

MARC ATKINS is a freelance photographer. He has exhibited across Europe and North America, and his images have been published in books and magazines world-wide.


IAIN SINCLAIR is the author of many books, including Downriver; Radon Daughters; White Chappell; Scarlet Tracings and Lights Out for the Territory.


excerpts & texts of interest (all texts are by Iain Sinclair unless mentioned)


_ All I can do is suggest scenarios. - Marc Atkins
_ I wanted a single sentence to contain everything I Knew.
_ He will 'print the darkness' and give it a stronger, more disquieting element.
_ By excluding inessentials, he allowed fiction to creep in at the back door.
_ ' I understand who I was'. It is our job, as predators who exploit the photographer's skill, to  
   come up with the fictions, essays, improvisations that will grant darkness a history and draw it,
   tentatively, towards the light.


_ Poems that failed the audition.
_ Shadows infecting a shoreline that resisted metaphor
_ The cutesy surrealism of the minor celebrity who is annoyed to be recognized and suicidal if
   ignored.


_ CONDEMN THE BUILDINGS NOT THE INHABITANTS - Graffiti on BLACKWALL TUNNEL


_ We puzzle over a laminated map which has been placed at the entrance to this tame forest 
   with the sole purpose of confusing pedestrians, by making them doubt all the instincts that
   have carried them so far. YOU ARE HERE ! 'I am not', you want to scream. "I never was. That  
   was another person with my name".   


_ We walk the neat avenues invigilating tombstones for names that might be incorporated into 
   future fictions.
_ He doesn't want to photograph anything that will still be there tomorrow.
_ How it was more pertinent to ask, could I write about Whitehead's artwork, dedicated to
   memory, committed to erasure?

_ A sense of the upriver suburbs that owed everything to an engagement with surrealism.
_ Achieve an impossible balance between the nightmare of existence and a vision of Eden.
_ I have always believed that bringing the best writers, the sharpest intelligences to any location
   alters it forever.
_ Prophetic fragments of poems left for an instant on black boards, before being wiped out.


ABSTRACT
This book impinges the factual and fictional interplay of London as a city. The Photographs of Marc Atkins creates the necessary fiction for Iain Sinclair to create a sublime journey through the latent and relatively unperceived view of London. Its murky, fancied, sudden and at times blatant with its loudness of expression. London melts poignantly through the Thames and has already started changing my clichéd viewpoint as a tourist.