A small selection of edited reviews on Marc Atkins’ work.
Review of ‘Liquid City’, published by Reaktion Books 1998:
"The 180 images in Liquid City demonstrate
the ambitious scope of Atkins"s vision. From high on the roof of a
mock-Byzantine temple we look down on the Thames, its brilliant sheen
offset by a shadowy high-rise skyline - a modern monochrome Canaletto,
huge but depopulated, empty of all human activity.
Atkins captures forgotten places passed by en route to somewhere else
- desolate post-industrial sites on the edge of the river, a static
caravan flying a Union flag somewhere on the estuary, the Dartford
river crossing rising triumphantly into the haze. He revels in derelict
back-streets and decaying monuments - the cracked surface of the John
Bunyan effigy in Bunhill fields, or his own shadow falling across
William Blake’s gravestone.
Alongside photographs of Michael Moorcock and Peter Ackroyd in the
back of a cab or relaxing next to a street sign reading Dan Leno Walk
SW6, Atkins portrays a litany of vanished writers. Some are dead (Kathy
Acker, Derek Raymond), others are missing (David Gascoyne, a "natural
psychogeographer" whose only novel explores Twickenham’s "sublimely
ordinary surfaces") and others are denizens of pubs too far from
Clerkenwell for them to have tangled much with the mainstream media.
As for the images themselves, Sinclair is right when he says Atkins
lacks the "tender human curiosity of Robert Frank" - the
portraits feel cold, the remoteness of the subjects unpunctured. More
haunting are his odd images, reminiscent of Man Ray’s, of the human
figure photographed in the intimacy of a curtained room. Atkins has
worked the light over and over in the darkroom, burning away layers
of detail, drawing down a veil that suggests roughed-up archive celluloid,
transforming a person into an apparition."
by Tristian Quinn, ‘New Statesman’ Magazine, Monday 5th July 1999
Review of exhibition at ‘The Foundry’, Great Eastern St, London, July 2000:
Marc Atkins is a dark-edged photographer of London’s hidden places,
secret histories and sinister "characters". Noirish, morbid
and dramatising, Atkins’ photography captures an urban state of mind.
Here (The Foundry, Great Eastern St, London, EC2) he puts on a show
of large-scale photographs.
by Jonathan Jones: ‘The Guardian’ newspaper
Review of Marc’s photography in ‘Hotshoe International’ Magazine:
The official message is that London is hip. Marc Atkins suggests it’s
old, dark, and far more powerful. Atkins’s vision of London is crepuscular,
even when it"s broad daylight. There’s always a sense that what you
can’t see is made visible in other forms. The creatures of the night
(if that’s what you want to call them) have a transparency that nonetheless
casts a shadow. And in their element these forms become concrete.
You can’t see the figures who commission or undertake the surveillance
of others, but as other you can survey their gaze. The city, at once
a place organised by scopic power and planned authority, is also a
place where things become unravelled and fall apart. That collapse
is no more evident than at the margins - a zone of uncertainty and
hybridity where the detritus of the city is shed, disintegrating into
a flaky dust like sloughed reptilian skin. But Atkins’s accurate observation
is that the margin can as easily be in King’s Cross as on the Isle
of Grain: the city may have finished with you, but you don’t know
it yet. But that equation works both ways: despite the camera’s baleful
eye people and objects can fall into gaps where observation is escaped,
and broken, used up, the discard becomes valuable in new and unthought
ways. The great trick of the photograph is the game it plays with
time: fixing the present as immediately past and re-presenting it
infinitely into the future. But with the best of Atkins’s photographs
you get a sense that it includes time which preceded the moment -
as though not only the present were there for eternal inspection,
but that all the time which had influenced the moment, the subject,
the space of the photograph, was, despite its dissipation still there,
occluding the image. The logic of the camera would deny this mystery:
we"re talking poetics here not optics, not science. The camera is
imaginatively structured around a mlinear progression of time, fractions
of which might be trapped and preserved. But Atkins’s photography,
which perverts the authoritarian, scopic, role so often assigned to
the camera in the city, also suggests that camera is not simply an
unthinking. Modernist, machine, servant of linear progress and ratiocination.
Time past is contained in time future,and time future contained in
time past, as Eliot put it. Marc Atkins’s images are evidence that
the poetic thought can infect even the most perfectly scientific of
discourses.
- from article in ‘Hotshoe International’ Magazine: September/October 1999
Book review - "Warsaw" published by WIG-PRESS, 2005:
Marc Atkins is best known for his photographs
of London. Several of these were published in the collaborations with
Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory and Liquid City, but they
represent only a handful of the reputed 30,000 images of the city
that he has created. These urban icons should be seen alongside the
other aspects of his oeuvre: portraits (eleven of these, chiefly of
maverick writers, are housed in the National Portrait Gallery); and
dreamed-of scenarios and narratives, the most mysterious and least
well-known area of his work. With his latest publication, Warsaw,
arousing huge curiosity in the Polish capital, he has returned to
urban iconography in a way that clearly invites comparison and contrast
with his representations of London. The choice of subjects in the
later series reflects a desire to re-frame the earlier work as part
of a structure of correspondences. It becomes possible to pair off
single images and groups of images as mutually defining.
One of the most revealing comparisons brings together the funerary
traditions epitomized in studies of individual tombstones. The London
variants are among Atkins’s most celebrated images; they show
crumbling stone, infested with decay, absorbed into and overcome by
organic growth which mimics and subverts the forms of statuary and
stonemasonry. The monument’s passage through time is characterized
by friction and granulation. In Warsaw, the stone is polished; marble
is used, or composite emulations of marble’s smoothness, memorializing
not so much the manner of death—as is common especially in eighteenth
century inscriptions in Britain, recording the progress of the body’s
disintegration and the soul’s resolution—but a phase of
existence long before the moment of decease, during a period of health,
vitality and self-possession. This aura of immunity is captured in
a small portrait photograph that is sealed with a hard glaze, in a
culture where the enshrining of the relic was superseded by the preservation
of Lenin’s tissue. The architecture of death is cryogenic in
Eastern Europe. It is the architecture of the everyday that is subject
to dramatic forms of abrasion.
Image after image in the Warsaw series shows the flux and reflux of
history; history hurrying in opposite directions; backwards and forwards
at one and the same time. Large areas of the city are feral. Ill-kempt
and overgrown farm-land survives less than a mile from the city centre;
Atkins focuses on an agricultural penthouse, typical of the improvised
architecture of the countryside, its only gesture to modernity an
array of different-sized plastic buckets, the most modern of materials
being utilized for the most primitive of necessities. The land-use
demonstrated in the shadow of soviet-style tower blocks and the cranes
of present-day construction adheres to the traditional mixed economy
of the village. While one half of Polish society prepares for global
postmodernity, the other half retreats into a subsistence recess.
This photograph is not so much elegiac as prophetic: of a modernity
that is less and less totalized, more and more likely to be cannibalized
for spare parts; of history as a setting for divergences, which seems
to be the implication of Atkins’s study of the Old Town, that
epitome of post-war reconstruction, the occasion of national pride
and self-confidence, portrayed here as a focus of uncertainties, a
multi-perspectival grid of shifting points of view, absent vistas:
a secret desire for impasse. The Atkins obsession with infrastructure,
with competing forms of transit and transport, is distilled in a portfolio
of depictions of empty or under-used thoroughfares. This badly-lit
and vacated modernity, often jerry-built or apparently unfinished
bears a family resemblance to Ilya Kabakov’s. We Live Here
Now’, an installation in which the grandiose ambitions for a
technologized future are abandoned by workers who live out their days
in the prefabricated huts intended for use only during the period
of construction.
Atkins’s representations of Warsaw push hard at the paradox of
grossly overcrowded private space absorbing a stereotypical Polish
gregariousness, while a false communality is identified with the unwanted
abundance of public fora and meaningless concourses. A junction of
darkened boulevards, catering to buses, trams and even cycle paths,
is completely deserted except for two waiting pedestrians, whose twilit
vigil is at the centre of a seemingly entropic system, with the batteries
of modern city life running low, and the schematic outlines of bicycles
curiously miniaturized marking the foreground like police records
of a presence gone forever.
This Warsaw is a city of disappearances, of a history leaching out
through the stone and brick of a fabric that could not be more distressed,
whose patched and stained facades offer maximum resistance to the
wipe-clean surfaces of modernity. In a city whose foundations lie
in sands and gravels, the archaeology is all above ground, the record
of past conflicts only skin-deep beneath a thin layer of badly-mixed
plaster, apparently designed to fall away in time for each generation
to have to rehearse its own strategies for oblivion. In many ways,
the most haunting of these images is Atkins’s Breughel-equivalent
version of a new Babel, a monument to unrestrained ambition, to the
desire for endlessly upward mobility that could not be more weighed
down. This is his portrayal of the new television centre. The amount
of pressure per square centimetre bearing down on this structure is
like that on the ocean floor. But this solidified vacancy, this shrine
to the dead zone, is also something else; it is the Colosseum, exactly
as dreamed of by Hitler.It was only after the visit of Hitler and
Albert Speer in the nineteen thirties, that the Colosseum was cleared
of the centuries-old colonies of flora and fauna that had learned
to live in its shadow, including several unique species. All this
had to disappear when the building became the blueprint for a new
culture, for a barbarous form of civilization in which a ruin becomes
the image of the future, not the image of the past; not a place that
shows all the evidence of many cycles of growth and decline, of a
process of continuous change. Photography is often thought of as a
medium that fixes the moment, cryogenising it for future generations,
but it can also become the means of showing how nothing is ever fixed,
how the moment will always elude us, how all that can be recorded
is irrevocable loss; and it is somewhere in the shifting sands between
those two positions that Marc Atkins’s work is situated.
by ROD MENGHAM in "The Liberal Magazine"
"Liquid City" book review:
Marc Atkins and Iain Sinclair worked together
on Lights Out for the Territory, though in that collection of essays
Atkins" name appeared more often in the text than his photographs
did on the page. Liquid City rights the balance, offering a couple
hundred pages of images only occasionally broken up by Sinclair"s
commentary. The photographs, infused with the light over London, capture
derelict scenes, abandoned pathways split by weeds, the x of two contrails
in the sky over grim concrete bunkers. He plays with the paranoia
induced by surveillance cameras, becoming himself a kind of freelance
surveillance device. All black and white, the photographs reveal contemporary
London in the way Stanley Greenberg"s Invisible New York opens up
that city beneath, between, and around the buildings of its overdeveloped
skyline. But Atkins is also adept at portraiture; many are striking,
framing, for example, the casual exhibitionism of a naked man in a
hospital bed adjusting long stockings. But if Sinclair"s interest
in psychogeography is an attempt to find something beneath London"s
relentless self-promotion, he hardly keeps himself from using the
cachet of its arts crowd to advance his cause. Happily, the modishness
is little more than a flare at the edge"s of Atkins" dark work.
- Paul McRandle
Review of ‘Liquid City’, published by ‘Reaktion Books’:
"Liquid City, an addendum to Lights Out, will be an easier entry point for all but the most rugged readers, if only because the text takes a back seat to the photography of Marc Atkins (...). Atkins's pictures and Sinclair's short bursts of text (mostly sketches of the marginal literati and eccentric academics that are his friends and/or heroes) operate independently, only rarely serving as illustration/caption to each other. But the deep affinity between the pair leaps off the page."
- ‘Down and Out in London’ by Simon Reynolds, August 17th, 1999, in ‘The Village Voice’ Magazine
Read complete review at Village Voice website - click here
Review of ‘Liquid City’, published by ‘Reaktion Books’, 1998:
I still think Atkins is our real discovery.
There are bits in his photos that scare me. He sees things that I
have never considered, pieces of undisturbed debris and scatterings
of lost thoughts that echo from windows high above. I shiver a bit.
My mind takes hold of hold of memories from people I have never seen,
strangers, in the future as well as the past.
- by Annie Morrad: A journey through London, "RISING EAST", Volume 3, Number 3
Review of ‘Liquid City’, published by ‘Reaktion Books’, 1998:
In their previous collaboration Lights
Out For The Territory Marc Atkins’; few dark, brooding photographs
added focus to Iain Sinclair’s dense, impressionistic, psychogeographical
formulations about the city in which he loves to drift. Here Atkins’
penetrating black and white portraits and his beautiful, troubling
shots of a London we forget we know dominate.This attempt to articulate
a truth about a space is an impossible project, and it is impossible
to hold a fixed position on it - as the title Liquid City suggests.
Sinclair and Atkins know this (Sinclair praises his friend for creating
flux whereas his writing tries to "mould wriggling chaos")
but the project proves worthwhile as it has produced words and remarkable
pictures. This is a visual feast of contemporary photojournalism,
in which Atkins’s visions help the reader perceive a London that can
- by Mark Thwaite
Review of ‘Thirteen’, published by ‘The Do Not Press’, 2002:
Through its 176 black and white pages,
13 provides a juxtaposition of imagery and words: photographic nudes
by Marc Atkins are "illustrated" with text commissioned from thirteen
writers of note, two of whom are former musicians. The authors range
from novelist Julian Rathbone to New York columnist Maggie Estep via
Bill Drummond (best known for his part in confrontationist pop/art
unit, KLF) and Groupie author, Jenny Fabian. Some, like Nicholas Royle
and Stella Duffy, are rising stars of British literature; others,
such as biographer James Sallis and journalist Mick Farren (formerly
of 60s psych underground garage band The Deviants, 70s band The Pink
Fairies and a contributor to NME) are seasoned veterans. All thirteen
were given a nude photo and asked to write an accompanying piece.
The results are a mixed bag but always interesting and often provocative.
Some of the prose seems to have absolutely nothing to do with the
image that precedes it (James Sallis), while other authors seem to
have gone to great pains to make their words entirely in keeping with
photo (Lauren Henderson). Mick Farren"s poetic entry is short yet
sublime, former KLF mad man Bill Drummond muses over nudes from Ancient
Greece through to Asian Babes circa "98, Maxim Jakubowski"s Parisian
sojourn is almost pornographic and Miles Gibson goes off on his own
journey through an umbilicus. Arty, yet accessible and some of the
nude shots are exquisite. Naturally, it"s priced just right at 13
quid.
- by Adrian Smith
Review of ‘Liquid City’, published by ‘Reaktion Books’, 1998:
It is hard to describe just what exactly
the book is‚ is it a travelogue, is it an exploration of the process
of change constantly taking place in London or is it just a montage
of pictures with a rambling sometimes connected discourse? Actually‚
it’s a bit of all the above, but whatever it is there is a definite
pull being exerted. Marc Atkins is a renowned photographer and his
images of mainly East and South East London (though Temple Bar is
in Herts) form the core of the book. What you won’t find is a tourist
trail. This book looks at things that we have forgotten (often with
very good reason) or that have crumbled away with neglect. The landscapes
are often stark and industrial, but sometimes close and intimate.
The liquid refers to the Thames which although not ever-present, lurks
in the background in all its mystery. Although not in any particular
order, it manages to start on the M25 boundary at West Thurrock, but
no views of happy shoppers at Lakeside‚ just the overgrown railway
lines and towers of power stations and refineries. This sets the tone
for a preoccupation with decay, be it tombs in Bunhill fields, the
vast cemetery at Leyton or just modern concrete tombs of architects
ideals of towers in the sky. Places such as Blooms are a welcome contrast
when you turn the page.
The writing veers between poetry and living diary‚ but still seductively
pulls you in. Contrast or complimentary, whatever your viewpoint this
is a work that along with "Robinson in Space" almost creates a new
genre.
- by Amanda Carrington
Website reviews:
Swiatobrazu
"Akty Marca Atkinsa w Instytucie Mikołowskim"
Fotopolis
Fotografu
""Nudes" – wernisaż wystawy fotografii Marca Atkinsa"
Foto-Fashion
"Wystawa MARCA ATKINSA pt. NUDES"
Ulubione
Zdjeciareklamow