 The earliest one that I can date or have a go at dating seems actually quite a few years prior to the ones of George Dyer And that the ones of Colin McInnes, I mean that he looks quite young, must be early fifties So from the full set I can't trace it whether they were actually used or whether they were commissioned by Vogue or from another magazine I don't know if they were ever used So there's a double exposure of Colin McInnes looking in a suit Very like I must say the man in blue or the business man series of baking paintings And then the other one of Colin McInnes is interesting because More sort of correctly I'm supposed to say multiple exposure. Yeah, and this one is a multiple This looks like three potentially four But I think three images there and the fact that this image seems to work Perhaps suggests a degree of skill in the positioning and the lighting and allowing the exposure to be balanced I was gonna ask about how away I think he was of other photographers, of surrealist photographers, of people who are working with those kind of manipulations because he's also quite often presented as If not perhaps a naive photographer as somebody who's kind of working as a kind of maverick Yeah, and also He was working as a commercial photographer So this kind of link to more artistic photography is something which is interesting when we're looking at these manipulated The arc of his artistic learning really I suppose took off when he became associated with Arthur Jeffress He was a bright young thing millionaire playboy international playboy They had a fairly sophisticated lifestyle for especially for the pre-war years going to the Bahamas and New York and Mexico and Venice Living a kind of high life and acquiring pictures and paintings He had a painting show in 1938 that by all accounts as well received very strange sort of like really heavy Pasto paintings that look very indebted to Ruo Some people say that he found a camera at a party and picked it up and that's how he started Photographing I think we can say that he picked up an awareness of the variety of techniques of photography through the really interesting photographer called Barbara Cursema who had her own studio and worked Photographing kind of society people that she was connected to for instance of Nancy Cunard and various painters And she liked experimenting with ideas that she picked up from the European trends in photography For instance from Man Ray and Kurt Esch liked using solar eyes to kind of techniques in her society portraits I discovered a direct connection to Deakin in the Barbara Cursema records and the archives that they hold at tape Deakin actually features in them on really many pages the potential for Deakin picking up an awareness of how you could function as a photographer what techniques you might use What were the latest trends coming from Europe how you could play with the manner and the equipment is I suppose there's a really direct hint that Barbara Cursema played a significant part in that process She photographed him and she turns up in a photograph album that contains photographs of Deakin and A photograph of a person called Rosemary McColl in a double exposure So whether Deakin took this double exposure or Barbara Cursema is difficult to say There are photographs by Deakin in the album stamped on the back with his Photographer's stamp from before the war which shows that he thought of himself seriously enough to have a stamp made You know I had a painting show in 1938 by 1939. He'd had a photography stamp made So he had started photography and had started a studio and then the eruption of the second world war displaced everything During the war he worked for the army film and photographic unit were all sorts of techniques and Tricks and things like that would have been if not taught at least picked up because the teaching was actually fairly Unformalized as far as I can understand it Do you think the double exposure sit with any particular explored trail of surrealism? You know because it's quite late really isn't it for people to be engaging with surrealistic ideas But they were young men at the time when Surrealism was really exploding and was I suppose was the new what might be the most interesting sphere of art from the late 20s and 30s, but you know this is going into the 50s and the 60s Do you think there was still a lot of playing around with surrealism? Do you think that's what this is? I think there certainly was in terms of commercial Photography and also that surrealism carried on in all sorts of other places outside of Paris for a long time I mean well into the 1960s in right to a Czechslovakia or even in the United States where there are other Photographers that are using these kind of techniques. I mean I suppose it would have been fairly not quite old-fashioned yet But it would have been yeah off-trend Yeah theme presenting itself as a surrealist Yeah, which I don't think is what's happening here, but you can certainly relate it back to some of that earlier material One of the original ideas that interested me when I started looking at the double exposures was where they sit in the grand scheme of modernism and 20th century art some of the key painters When they were photographed would appear as a double exposure. So for instance, there's double exposures of Max Ernst There are double exposures of Picasso There are double exposures of T.S. Eliot's the double exposures of Duchamp The earliest one I can find actually is for Degas the painter where he's photographed in a double exposure So it seems like perhaps when photographers are looking for some way to express the all-seeing genius of characters perhaps more famous artists that have a personality in the public eye that the double exposure seems to fit in a fairly Consistent and universal way when they want to allude to you know Explosive creative potential of their artistic mind that it's not contained by one solid face They need multiple exposures to illustrate the breadth and the depth of their thinking or that complicated identity of the creative It seems to me really fascinating that Picasso actually generated his own double exposures and use them as the basis to generate works Picasso actually photographed Duane Russo in front of Russo painting So there was a portrait on top of a painting photographed them separately And then superimposed them on top of each other because it seems to be fairly literal to the degree that makes me suspicious of it The fact that double exposure, you know in the way Particularly of these portraits that they are the same subject in the same room at the same moment But just moved slightly and that's really does seem to be almost like a literal jump there to the multiple planes of cubism The different angles up but all on the same viewpoint. Yeah I mean if we think about what picture making does about pictorial representation that it is taking a world Which is not flat making it into a flat image What enables you to do that is this kind of freezing of time So it gets rid of all sorts of other aspects out of the picture so to speak So the double exposure kind of allows you to bring back that element of time and to represent things from different angles And to represent different states within a singular image