PHOTO-TEXT DIALECTICS IN IAIN SINCLAIR’S RE-VISION OF LONDON
PHOTO-TEXT DIALECTICS IN IAIN SINCLAIR’S RE-VISION OF LONDON

Summary/Abstract: There is a meaningful photographic undercurrent in the work of Iain Sinclair and it can be argued that the photographic greatly affects the writer’s literary vision, or re-vision, of London. Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin and many others pointed out that photography introduced a new level of perception, taught us to notice the usually overlooked details. As Russian Formalist Ossip Brik put it, ‘‘[t]he camera [...] can see in ways that man is not accustomed to – can suggest new points of view and demonstrate how to look at things differently” (2003: 90). Consequently, Sinclair’s frenetic catalogues of impressions may be regarded as evidence that he sees the city photographically and thus recognises the simultaneous presence and absence of his mythical London. As it has been mentioned before, in Lights Out for the Territory, Sinclair states that Atkins can do with one image what he is struggling to achieve through prose. Suddenly this comment acquires a much broader meaning. Due to the nature of the medium, a photograph by Marc Atkins indeed captures the essence of Iain Sinclair’s writing: its confluence of reality and fiction, presence and absence, life and death, the present and the past, the banal and the marvellous, subjectivity and objectivity, memory and erasure.

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