 The idea originally was generated from a line in a book by Martin Harrison where he explores Francis Bacon's use of photographs, the books called in camera, and under a worn and tattered photograph of George Dyer taking in Bacon's re-smooth studio, he suggests that because a double exposure on a rolloflex camera is difficult or impossible to do accidentally that it must have been a process actively engaged in between Deakin and Bacon. That idea sat with me for a while and then took me back to looking at the double exposures that I knew from the archive that I hadn't really considered in any way apart from as being mistakes or errors in process but so after having read Martin Harrison's kind of notes there I went back to them to go through them again which is what generated the idea that we might have something more interesting than a mistake. I wonder if you could say a little bit about that practice between the two So the images that Deakin took for Bacon the understanding of how and where and when they were commissioned has really been unexplored. The earliest record we have of Deakin meeting Bacon is when he photographed him for Vogue I think it was December 51 but the relatively small circle I suppose sort of like a edgy creative homosexual underground scene that they centered on around Soho both pre-wall and post-wall means it's difficult to imagine that they wouldn't have known each other earlier. The classic photograph of Bacon with sides of meat became a defining image of Bacon but it post-states Bacon's first use of meat and painted imagery. After that photograph Bacon painted a very similar kind of layout using meat with a central figure and two hanging halves of a car because of me either side of him so there's like a one two three backwards and forwards there which kind of suggests at least a conversation between the two. We have other photographs of meat that Deakin took on holiday with Bacon in Athens in 1965 he was on holiday with George Dyer and Bacon. The process may have been so loose that Deakin could have thought about taking photographs that prospectively Bacon may have liked mainly because he got paid I suppose by Bacon and so any sort of extra work that he could get would tell the possibility of further payment. I mean I wonder if you could say a little bit about how Bacon used the prints themselves. So the process of engaging Deakin to photograph what became his standard subjects Bacon's standard subjects of his friends and associates around Soho of course they both knew the same people and went to the same places Bacon and Deakin even holiday together with Dyer in 65. Prints that Deakin would have made for Bacon would have gone through some sort of process of selection from perhaps from contact sheets or they would have been pre-delivered as you know give me five of each of those and he would have walked them around I suppose and handed them over so this it's difficult to say there but we do have marked contact sheets of Muriel Belcher that Bacon painted from where there are two double exposures on the roll and if any sort of presentation was shown to Bacon to select from he would have seen these other double exposures and of course you know the strange effects and the strange photographs that kind of piqued his interest and grabbed up the way that he generated ideas to paint from you can completely understand how it sits within that. As it developed I suppose they reached a high point really in the ones for George Dyer which were taken in Bacon's studio with the mess of his working practice you know the detritus and the complete wreck of all the previous paint boxes and paint brushes and material all around the floor. There are two double exposures on that roll there are two prints that exist of the same double exposure but on one of them he's painted out key parts of the body and the double to kind of give a more disjointed body so paint out one part of one leg but keep the other part that doesn't associate with that position and to give the disjointed kind of figurative shape to the body. The essential link between double exposures and Bacon's painting is illustrated most strongly in a painting where the layout and design of the deacon double exposure ends up essentially carried over into the painting. The double exposure in this sequence doesn't seems to be the sitter repeated twice most of the other double exposures are the same person photographed twice on the same shot but this uniquely seems to be a different person shot on the negative of a previous sitter and the positioning of the face on the buttocks and the derriere of Henriette Marais gives another layer of subversive sexual almost insulting kind of imposition over the construct. Who that face might be because it looks like a man takes you into all sorts of funny little corners and whether it might be Peter Lacey Bacon's boyfriend prior to George Dyer but it also interestingly looks like Peter Watson. One of the directors of the ICA Institute of Contemporary Historical Bacon had his first solo show in 55 and of course this is only known because we have the negative from the full role the prints that ended up in Bacon's possession and then over the process became painted on trampled on cut up folded and all the rest of the kind of finance of Bacon enacted on the photographs to kind of get the image that he wanted. This image is not known from amongst the detritus. There are two images of a double exposure of a bacon painting unglazed in the street. I think this is outside of overstrung mansions in Battersea with the Woolworth air standing in front. Looking at it unglazed one of the things that we talked about a while back was the glazing of Bacon's own paintings where there is this argument he made for a kind of super imposition within his own paintings where he had all of them glazed to a fairly high finish so that the viewer of the painting becomes part of the image itself which I think is also quite interesting just for looking at this photograph where this figure is positioned in front of it they become part of the painting itself. He's actually is interrupting your sight line of the bacon painting by standing in front of it in a double exposure which is so similar to the effect of a reflection in glass. I mean it also makes you think about how you look at these photographs because in some ways we are also kind of struggling to make out what the image is within it or which was taken first or those sorts of questions and making out what is the outline of one image and what is the outline of another. So there's a sort of play between what Bacon's doing with these photographs and what Deacon is doing with Bacon's painting. It's interesting to look at some of the images as they exist now as prints in Bacon's studio or the reconstruction of that to see the kind of state that they're in. I mean some of this is wear and tear and some of it is deliberate manipulation of the image which has a kind of, well it's been argued that there's a kind of violence I suppose to the photograph itself and it's interesting then to really look at these double exposures and think about those as an almost kind of iconoplastic aspect we talked about being able to see new images within it but actually there's also a kind of destruction of being able to identify the figure that's happening here as well. In this photograph that we're looking out of Dyer in the studio is really interesting because what stays still just about in the image is this morass of material in the studio itself which this photograph then itself became part of. So it's a kind of an image within an image, with an image within an image inside it as well. So there's a lot of kind of ideas about image making and how we recognize or mis-recognize things within this photograph. It raises some quite interesting questions about where the Bacon scholarship focuses its attentions because there's an awful lot of focus obviously on what is in the remains of the studio but often without necessarily taking into account that that's a 40 year old space and that as we know from looking at the photographs of Dyer in that studio and then seeing the prints that have then become part of that studio it's in constant motion. So we don't necessarily know that what's there at the time of his death was what was there in the mid 60s. So this archive I think allows a very different take on this material it allows us to pose quite different questions about it which may be more speculative than going with the evidence of the studio but it asks us I think to kind of address quite how we use that studio material and to treat it with slightly more trepidation than it has been in the past. Deakin was really supported by Bacon and able to live pretty much you know he would pay for his holidays and pay for meals out and he even gave him proceeds from a painting to live on supposedly and then towards the end of his life when Deakin had lung cancer. Bacon visited him often in hospital and brought him gifts and books and then at the end of his life paid for Deakin to be sent to Brighton to convalesce which is where he died the very next day. Their associations are almost familial and that it brings to mind the phrase of queer kinship the fact that he would name him as next of kin which seems like a joke but actually when your friends are your closest family which is often a kind of constructing queer friendships I think it indicates that just how close they were on their understanding of each other might have been ragged and annoying and irritating to each other but actually that they would just fundamentally had a long it shared history.