Description
“Perspective Loss” is the ninth 2022 Chapbook or Photozine (September 2022 edition) from Simon, based on his personal photography.
This Chapbook “Perspective Loss” is A5 in size, made up of 32 pages and featuring 16 segments of a single panoramic photo captured by Simon. Thoughtfully printed on quality, heavy-duty paper (more details below), only 100 will ever be printed of these limited-edition chapbooks. Each one is numbered. (Subscribe to the complete 2022 chapbook series here)
From inside the front cover of “Perspective Loss”;
Your experience of this chapbook starts with looking. Perhaps you’ll find more geographic detail than can be comprehended, perhaps less image resolution than you’d like.
My experience of these images also started with looking and I certainly saw more than I could comprehend. I was standing on a 20th century sealed roadway that runs across an ice-age derived bog that blankets an unseen bedrock of granite, itself a pluton of the Donegal Batholith that’s probably 400 million years old. And I was looking over towards the town of Gortahok whose bedrock of metasediments is twice that age.
The images herein are contiguous selections from that geological timescape, presented in seventeen parts. Think of it as a polyptych panorama without content awareness. Consider it as a hymn(1) in 50 megapixels.
This is a bookscape that powers eastwards from turf on the Bloody Foreland towards modern wind turbines on distant hills. The turning pages pan over settlements still energised by hydrocarbons, spiked with telegraph poles in service to gabled houses that might be permanent homes (or not).
It’s a landscape comprised of islands, mountains and beaches to which we have given names like Tory and Inishboffin, Muckish and Errigal, Magheraroarty and Tramore.
There’s the seascape of the Atlantic Ocean in which Tory Sound and Ballyness Bay are exploitable from the townscapes such as Gortahok, Falcarragh and Meenlaragh.
And it’s a layered virtual mapscape. There are unseen arbitrary assignments of townland extents like Killult and Drumnatinn within which religion has formed parishes like Tullaghobegly and Raymunterdoney. Conquest probably named the Barony of Kilmacrenan. You may have been taught by litany that these places are in the county of Donegal within the province of Ulster, itself divided between two nations on the island of Ireland, outboard of the continent of Europe. It’s a shared world!
Struggles of culture and language persist among the fields and homes captured here. Seo íomhá de Ghaeltacht le ainmneacha “Cearta” ar nós Tóraigh, Machaire Rabhartaigh, Gort an Choirce, An Fál Carrach, Ráith, Tulacha Beigile, Cill Mhic Réanáin agus Dún na nGall.
(1) After Geoff Dyer’s 2015 essay ‘Andreas Gursky’ in See/Saw (2021).
More Chapbook Details
Saddle Stitched Book A5, Cover Silk 250gsm, Inner Silk 150gsm,
Portrait, Saddle Stitch Binding, Cover Both Sides, Cover One Side Matt, Inner Both Sides
See more about what Simon has to say about this Chapbook in these pages from his blog – walkingcommentary.net
- ‘Perspective Loss’ – this is the post made by Simon when he mailed “Perspective Loss” to his subscribers
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