 First of all, I want to say that in taking one photograph, a good photographer is really taking two. One with the camera in his hands, and one with the visual imagination. The photograph in his head is a photograph of his idea of the sitter, and he needs perception and his study to have the idea. The other is easy, but the two photographs have to be superimposed, one on the other in some peculiar and unexplainable way at the moment when the camera clicks, and that is very hard indeed. Being fatally drawn to the human race, what I want to do when I photograph it is to make a revelation about it, so my sitters turn into my victims. But I would like to add that it is only those with a demon, however small and of whatever kind, whose faces lend themselves to being victimised at all. So this is the first two paragraphs from Deakin's text that he wrote for a prospective exhibition of eight portraits, so it's called the text for eight portraits. After this he goes through the eight portraits and talks about how he knows the subjects and what the image kind of means to him. But the first two paragraphs seem to illustrate something quite interesting. I think it you spotted originally, I had actually missed the subtle association that there might be in these kind of lines to the double exposures. It's quite interesting for thinking about how he is conceiving of every image that he takes as being a superposition about having an idea that's in his head and then having something which is actually in the camera. Because in the photographs themselves I suppose there's something slightly different happening where it's implied that there might be two aspects to the person presenting themselves rather than necessarily him thinking about how he's conceiving it. And I suppose the photographs are doing both of those things at the same time sort of about his framing of a shot with those sorts of postings framing of themselves. When you read the text you're saying the two photographs have to be superimposed one another in some peculiar and unexplainable way at the moment when the camera clicks it seems to allude to the process but also it seems to be slightly disingenuous because he's allowing some magic to be introduced into his conception of the process. A peculiar and unexplainable way it is actually possible to explain what he's doing when he does a double exposure so there's some sort of magical positioning there which is quite interesting when he goes on to discuss about he wants to reveal a demon in people that's kind of like his impulse when he's taking a portrait. Yeah and it seems to be there about the ability of photography to reveal something which is quite a peculiar idea because on the one hand we're thinking about the camera as a mechanical device something that's just really pretty similar to reality. And that's something that's mostly associated with Deakin's photography which you can really think about as being very unordyned, as being very straightforward. So this idea that it's revealing something mysterious or demonic goes back to much earlier thinking about photography things like spirit photography that's revealing these kind of ghosts in the background and in some ways these double exposures seem to reveal that side of his practice and an interest in actually revealing the unseen or something on the other side of the mirror perhaps. I really like the idea of the double exposure expressing a double self even the phrase, the etymology of the phrase becomes layered with meaning. The double exposure idea essentially does sit within that surrealist position which I suppose was generated from Freudian analysis which is that there's another self that can be exposed by applying certain techniques and that the double exposure almost by its very nature seems to really illustrate that concept in a very pure kind of way that there are two selves and by a certain process that's both mechanical and human that these illustrators in a moment by a click. I suppose that there's that way of looking at it that it could be two images and one of them is more real or not than the other but then there's also this idea which sort of sphere around bacon are really engaging with around existentialism at this time that you might have many faces and none of them are a genuine self and that you could also think about these images that actually they're all kind of a performance of a person and if we're looking at somebody like say Muriel Belcher who herself is kind of always on show when she's described in the setting of the colony rooms as something that's kind of constantly performing for her group of people it's quite interesting to think about it that way that it's not necessarily revealing a more genuine or authentic self by actually saying that that might not exist at all and I was very interested in this image that we're looking at here which is not related really to the circle around bacon it is tangentially because it's part of the art world itself at that time but this photograph of Pigeon Guggenheim where it's definitely kind of demonstrating this idea that creative people have an inner life they are working with the imagination and it's using the double exposure to kind of thematise that in some way but it's difficult to look at this photograph without thinking about the biographical details of her life as well as somebody who struggled with depression particularly because the pose itself is this kind of melancholic leaning on the hand but also then being surrounded by all of these kind of tools of the trade of brushes, pencils and all of those kinds of things so he's definitely kind of thinking about it not just as a kind of technical trick but also one which is able to communicate something from it and here I think there's a very deliberate play with psychological states that's related by specificity to the sitter I've not really thought about it before but the more I think about this image and as you say knowing a few biographical details of her that she's ultimately committed suicide I think is that these brushes and the tools as you say are almost crowding her out it's almost like then multiplying around her I know that she struggled with the relationship with her mother Pigeon Guggenheim that her mother didn't really support her artistic endeavours or had any merit which seems to be a fairly sort of almost become a standard trope of children of famous or successful adults working in the same sphere as their parents Even the pictures on the wall and boxes of paint and the paper is all actually coming up in her and unsettling her The studio that that's taken in her studio in Paris I think it was on the Ile de la Cite in the centre of Paris was right at the top of a very tall building with loads of skylights and glass and windows and rickety balconies around her It's quite an unusual composition compared to the others which are broadly centrally focused They're photographs where the sitter is centred which again you could relate back to some of Bacon's paintings which often have this kind of bilateral symmetry that's then thrown off through it in which the double exposure plays with an idea of symmetry, of mirroring but it's not ever really possible to get something that is that symmetrical so there's always something slightly unnerving about these images where they are slightly off centre which seems to be deliberate and which of course relates back to Bacon's painting but it's also used in sittings way outside of that circle And some of them, as Deacon was saying in his treatise of Eight Portraits he wanted to expose a demon in his sitter Some of them actually do come across as demonic almost in the classic sense I thought it was interesting that a double exposure photograph was used to promote the film about the possession the big film in the 70s The Exorcist which is de facto a demon possession It kind of links it straight through to that's more sort of gothic sort of extreme what double exposure infers The early years of photography I suppose around the late 1800s when the tricks become formalised I suppose the access to these tricks become like a specialised knowledge of the photographer in the fact that the general population I suppose wouldn't be aware that double exposure is anything other than reality a captured reality because that's the narrative of the establishment of photography that it uniquely manages to capture reality so they were able to create I suppose a whole subgenre of spirit photography and capturing ghosts and capturing dead people which again ties into Deakin's kind of inference that he was capturing a demon in people when he took their portrait I think these images are very interesting mid 20th century photographs which are really looking back to some of the origins of it for thinking about spiritualist photography for thinking perhaps about motion capture and they seem to be really thinking about photography itself as a medium as much as what's being captured in the image