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BILL JACKSON
PHOTOGRAPHY

out of my head southwold suffolk publication © bill jackson 2008

A writer, an artist and a curator were asked to comment on each of the three chapters. The book is available in Hardback or Softback and is 80 pages with over 70 images in full colour.

Can be bought online

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Nicholas Royle on The Nighthawks
You'd think these, or some of these, are daytime shots, with the movement of a little sleet or snow captured by a slow exposure. But the white scratches are stars, the regular curved signature representing their movement, or the planet's movement, through space. Once you realise that, you feel a curiously alienated, cosmic chill, but just for a moment, before the thrill of the realisation catches up. The skies that are light on the page were dark when Bill Jackson stalked these strange interzones between land and sea, sleep and consciousness, night and day. The title, 'The Nighthawks', has us studying the windows of caravans, sheds and houses for Hopperesque figures caught within, but there's not a sight of a living soul, save perhaps the alarming scarecrow in the final shot, the 'self portrait'. So we think instead of the nightjar, creepiest of birds, or of the night owl, he who enjoys being abroad when all others are abed. Jackson on the prowl.

Nicholas Royle is author of 5 novels including The Directors Cut and Antwerp

Simon Head on The Suffolk Landmarks
All the photographs in this series simultaneously quote from our memories as they write to our memories. This was my initial attraction, I knew this place and yet I had no idea. It's as if my recognition depended upon what was missing in the photographs and what was missing was what spooked me. Dianne Arbus once said 'what I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin and into somebody else's. And that's what all this is a little bit about. That somebody elseÕs tragedy is not the same as your own'. And yet 'every difference is a likeness to....'. 'The Suffolk Landmarks' are a powerful reminder of that and through them Bill Jackson is doing a pretty good job at teaching people to see without a camera.

Simon Head is an artist and photographer

Thomas Yeomans on Hampstead Heath
It is an extraordinary accomplishment, then, for an artist who is so attentive to a mechanical process to be able to create images so poetic. Where Jackson's talent as a photographer is unmatched is in his ability to reconcile these conspicuous threads in the work - a detached and intellectual process which produces highly evocative and passionate images. I would suggest that it is this thoughtfulness and restraint which prevents the images from being 'easy' or 'pretty'. Rather, it provides their edge and sophistication. This is romanticism relocated for a digital age.

Thomas Yeomans is an artist and curator