Preorder ‡ Dominic J. Jaeckle & Hoagy Houghton, 36 Exposures (A bastardised roll of film)
£20.00
Tenement Press / John Cassavetes / ISBN: 978-1-913513-46-7
390pp / 198x129mm
Designed & typeset by Ana Baliza
Texts by Dominic J. Jaeckle,
photographs by Hoagy Houghton,
with an afterword by Chris McCabe
Preorder now; forthcoming 30.06.24
Veronica Lake, Walden Pond, & River Phoenix I
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A new edition of a work first published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021, a first publication in the "John Cassavetes" series.
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Does language need to be reinvented in order to talk? Or even, to see? Dominic Jaeckle thinks so, and provides a compelling, propulsive essay poetry to accompany a year-long suite of pictures by Hoagy Houghton. This twitterverse feed takes philosophy personally, mixmasters it up with best friends and late-night movie simulations. While there are encounters by the galore, and biographical instants dropped like crumbs on a forest walk, the focus here is not on the story, but the lighting, the staging, the choreography of digression. Talk about talking. In these mirrors are reflections of a lost brother, an almost date, an almost self, on the times we used to have, the blood rites we shared until we couldn’t. Black and white photos offer starting points to think about colour. What colour is the memory of brother? The photographs offer shadowy basement creatures caught in the half light, as if the camera wasn’t even there, vacuuming up every decisive moment. Pensive, coiled, we are dropped in the midst of a drama that will need to bury a few Russian philosophers before life can begin again. And coursing through it all this essential belief: that the right painted apple, the right sentence, the right thought: would change the world. The revolution is in the waiting room.
Mike Hoolboom
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The methodology was as follows. Over the course of a single year, Houghton would send Jaeckle three photographs a month from his personal archive; Jaeckle would respond with an accompanying poem or prose work for each image. At the year’s end, the resulting collection would cover twelve months, comprising 36 images and 36 reactions, and express itself as a roll of film in the abstract. A contact sheet spoilt by written interventions; an index of distractions and elaborations; an array of materials that pictures a false or disrupted communication as ideas are exchanged and images developed over the course of a calendar year.
From the onset of the project to its end, Jaeckle and Houghton never met in person—this exchange of materials was their only means of communication—and thus, this collaboration is a form of conversation twelve-months wide and three-hundred-and-sixty-five days long. The texts number fragments, at turns essayistic and anecdotal; short stories, prose-poems, and assimilated citations. The images are largely personal: snapshots; familiar faces; passing objects of interest and attention; a visual diary in 35mm.
The Exposures project is a near-novel, a broken love song, an experiment in a direct and indirect address of ideas in both high and low definition, at high and low tide, when the moon is up, and when the sun is near.
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According to the Midrash, the light created by God on the first day of creation shone for exactly 36 hours. What lasting images were developed in that moment?
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Exposures of lived moments. Writing as an organising principle. Writing as complete commitment. Writing as life.
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Jaeckle shows us the difference between watching and looking. Between staring and focussing. Between thought-making and thinking.
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36 Exposures is a source book containing enough ejector seats for Jaeckle to get high as a writer for the rest of his life.
Chris McCabe
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See here for further word on this title.
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36 Exposures is a manuscript owing to an ongoing project called
Veronica Lake, Walden Pond, & River Phoenix—a cumulative train of thought, a series of spines, a ‘Legend of Duluoz’ in which the author argues with objects of interest in a borderless field of enquiry.
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Dominic J. Jaeckle
51.4545° N, 2.5879° W
Jaeckle is a writer, editor, and publisher. Jaeckle curated and collated the irregular magazine series Hotel and its adjacent projects, and publishes works of experimental and esoteric literature in English and in first-time English language translation via Tenement Press. For a sister work to the Exposures project, see here for the second publication in the "Cassavetes" series, Magnolia or Redbud (Flowers for Laura Lee Burroughs (Tenement Press / John Cassavetes, 2024).
Hoagy Houghton
51.5072° N, 0.1276° W
Houghton is an interdisciplinary artist based in London.
Chris McCabe
53.4084° N, 2.9916° W
McCabe’s work spans forms and genres including poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama and visual art. His work has been shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and the Republic of Consciousness Prize. His latest poetry collection The Triumph of Cancer (Penned in the Margins, 2018) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and he is the editor of several anthologies, including Poems from the Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages (Chambers, 2019) and, with Victoria Bean, The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2015). His novels are Dedalus (Henningham Family Press, 2018) and Mud (Henningham Family Press, 2019). McCabe is presently working on an epic series of psychogeographical books documenting the lost poets buried in London’s Victorian cemeteries, the latest of which is Buried Garden: Lockdown with the Lost Poets of Abney Park Cemetery (Penned in the Margins, 2021), which was chosen as a White Review Book of the Year in 2022. McCabe is National Poetry Librarian at Southbank Centre’s National Poetry Library, London.
Ana Baliza
38.7223° N, 9.1393° W
Baliza is an interdisciplinary artist based in Lisbon.