After driving backwards in time for one year I am now standing on the very same spot from which I left, but this time I am in someone else’s present. I pat down my pockets looking for a lighter and I feel like I am asleep and dreaming. I exist in a semi-permanent state of soft astral projection nowadays which confuses things for me sometimes, especially if I have just woken up, which I think I might just have. The person I am standing with reaches into their jacket pocket and hands me a lighter. It's green. I light the cigarette and my blurred outline sharpens up suddenly then snaps into focus as coordinates lock onto my location. I have always maintained that smoking can orientate in periods of uncertainty and in the duration of smoking one you can often get an accurate idea of where you are in space. Inhale, hold, look around, exhale and repeat until all the data is in..

 

 The Tarot (process) #3

Ever since my first contact with tarot cards, I have felt a strong connection to them and they have led me on a journey of insight and inspiration which has taken me far from their original teenage occult appeal. Their influence has reached deep into me and over time become part of what is now down there in the epiphanies of my gloom. Each time my focus has returned to them, it is like a new discovery with alternate universe revelations and filled with brand new mysteries. These cards have grown up with me, in real time, like a sister, the countryside or that feeling like I’m being watched. I see them now in my vertical photographs and I understand everything is all shuffled together into one.

 

 The Tarot (some background) #2

Once upon a time, a friend of mine thought that he had a cursed pack of Tarot cards and he asked me if I could help him to dispose of them, one card at a time. Simply throwing them away or burning them was not gonna cut it for him, so I agreed to meet up and divide the deck. He told me the best way to break the hex would be to shuffle and then deal out the pack between us and then for each of us to relocate every card separately from one another, somehow, out there in the world. This was to be done in a deliberate and mindful manner as possible and 4 months later, just before New Years Eve, my half was gone. I was 17 years old then, about to turn 18 and it all sounded like a cool idea at the time.

The Tarot cards were Alister Crowley's Book of Thoth (above). A visually striking deck, layered with dense symbolism and beautifully painted by Lady Frieda Harris and published in 1944. I had possession of half, which was around 39 cards and between September and December I found places for them in my world to be discovered by others. At times I felt like a reverse pickpocket as I slipped them into the coat pockets of strangers on the streets. I hid a few in library books here and there and put one inside a Bible on the pulpit in a church. I put the Death card into a bottle and threw it into the sea. I stuck the Hermit up in a phone box next to the call girl cards. I gave the Ace of Wands to a child to run and show their parents and I attached The Chariot card to the collar of a dog on fetch. I left The Sun at the top of a monkey puzzle tree in my local park, where I used to sit and read. These are just a few examples that I remember as I write this.

Looking back on this experience I now consider it a kind of esoteric introduction to an awareness of my own perception with an attention that I cannot remember ever giving to it before. It was a practical lesson in aligning (or assigning) the universal symbols of the tarot with that of my own psyche and in turn with the world around me, before pot and psychedelics entered the scene, making everything all about them. Maybe it was because of the hex, but I took the task seriously and I carefully considered each card before committing it to someone else’s present and my ultimate unknowing.

The Tarot (process) #1

I have noticed similar narratives emerge from both photographs and tarot cards. The tarot is made up of individual facets of the human condition which are distilled and represented in a single card which together as a pack can be viewed as a map of consciousness. In a traditional tarot reading, cards are turned over and placed into sequence in response to a question and a narrative emerges from between the cards and begins to connect them. Photographs are in turn facets themselves, distilled moments from a lifetime which, when viewed together, map out the story of our own lives. The initial impulse which motivates us to raise a camera in the first place stages the context (or question) which lies at a photograph's heart and contains within it the full unabridged biography of its author. Meaning photographs, like the tarot, are powerful psychological tools for exploring facets of our own psyches which may not otherwise be accessible to us and can only be read and comprehended as images.

 

Altered States of Agoraphobia (Monograph)

This month I got my first, hands on, contact with my book in the making (if only in part) when I was sent all the pages, prints and postcards that needed to be signed and numbered, before being returned to Bologna, Italy, so that it could be published and shipped (now in May 2022) to all those that have shown faith and pre-ordered a copy. This is a journey which began almost a year ago when I answered an open call from Eyeshot Publishing to submit a portfolio of photographs to be considered for a publishing contract. After Eyeshot received well over a thousand entries world wide, I was fortunate enough, along with 7 other photographers, to be offered the opportunity to make a monograph with them.

The book is a selection of 123 of my photographs over 186 pages with a picture index in the back and an introduction generously contributed by Blake Andrews in the front. The final image selection was made by Marco Savarese, editor in chief of Eyeshot Publishing and these were chosen from my initial submission of 200 photographs. These pictures were, in turn, selected from an original personal edit of around 500 images from a 5 year archive of a few thousand.

It would be true to say I had some trouble giving up control of my work for the sequencing stage of the book's creation. Although I did not yet have a solid idea about how I was going to sequence this work myself, I have always considered the assembling of my own photographs into sequence as an integral part of the overall creative vision of a finished project. To give this up has been a process of having faith and trusting my publisher and simply letting go of my fears and anxieties. Fortunately for me, Eyeshot has their own vision for their brand and it has been an exciting and enjoyable experience for me to see the book take shape through their eyes.

Eyeshot has also been receptive to any changes to the image pairings that I have wanted to make and when they presented the first complete edit of the book for me to review digitally, they accommodated these changes to the sequence that I felt really needed it. This has set my mind at rest and the finished book is the result of what has been an inspiring and enjoyable collaboration. Eyeshot's sense of style and design is elegant and their printing on Fedrigoni paper and packaging is all top quality. There will be two editions published, a standard “white” edition with a run of 420, costing 54,90 Euros ($56,90) and a limited “black" edition of 30 copies with a signed and numbered print included, sold at the collectors price of 210 Euros ($221) making it a complete run of 450 copies.

Although I have always known the physical dimensions of the book being 22 X 27cm, these numbers have never meant much to me and it was not until about a week ago when photographer’s David Graham and Vasilikos Lukas both shared pictures of their own recently published Eyeshot monographs, that I got, for the first time, an idea of my own books size and also a feel for its look and quality. I now have a tantalizing image of what it might be like, if only in my mind. These are all ephemeral, night time, doodle-bug thoughts though really. I am aware of how big the gulf is between the real world and the virtual one and how different an image can look on a screen compared to that of a physical print and the final goodnight thought is, the book's reality will remain a true mystery for me until I can actually hold a copy of it in my hands.

Altered States of Agoraphobia by Simon Kossoff is available to order from Eyeshot Publishing here.

You know when you have driven far enough, you can feel it. There are several stages to leaving and each stage is assigned a distance. These distances can be both physical and mental. Each distance is unique to each of us, as is the stage order to the leaving itself. The stages are only consistent across time with the first initial thought and the last physical action. You do know when you have driven far enough, but to truly leave a place is not such an easy task. There are some places that I left a long time ago, only to later discover that I was still there, emotionally, and the place was tangled up inside me and I was never going to be able to leave, no matter how far I drove or for how long. Sometimes a place is a person and my dreams have become a purgatory of souls that I cannot let go of and I have, over the years, become a haunted house where I have been afraid to spend the night.. So with this now being said, a question now begs; why leave anywhere ever again?

Sonder / Commentry #1

A parking lot on the vast southeastern plains of Colorado where the horizon is 360 degrees of wild unbroken prairie under a massive cloudless summer sky. I am far away from everywhere all over again. It's hot and a blustery July wind harasses me, tugging at my clothes incessantly, pulling from all directions, promising to drive me mad if I don’t take cover from it soon.

This is a photograph of me, taken in 1864. I have seen myself in history, like this, many times before, but it is not often I have had the presence of mind to get a record of it with my camera. It was part of a tourist information display at the site of the terrible Sand Creek Massacre. This photo is a close up of a larger group photograph of the US Volunteer soldiers that were part of it. It looked out at me and seemed to make eye contact from across time and across a parking lot like a spectral face in a distant scrying glass.

The face is one of the 675 anonymous murderers of 750 Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians which took place on the morning of November 29th 1864. Under the commanded of Colonel John M. Chivington and using small arms and howitzer fire, the troops drove the people out of their camp. While many managed to escape the initial onslaught, others, particularly noncombatant women, children, and the elderly fled into and up the bottom of the dry stream bed. The soldiers followed, shooting at them as they struggled through the sandy earth. During that afternoon and into the following day, the soldiers wandered over the field committing atrocities on the dead and dying before departing the scene on December 1st.

I don’t know why this photograph is me, but I don’t know why I am me either as I stand here looking at it today. And, as I begin to make a photo-record of it, I hold this question close, just in case the revelation that I am certain it holds, has a fuse on it. I let photographs naturally impose their own cool presence of mind upon the scene and I try, in this instance, to keep my-self out of it. The hope being that it will all make sense some day, later, upon reflection, tomorrow maybe.. I trust photography with all of these mysteries of the world and I have come to regard my camera as another sense apparatus with which to perceive it.

The wind finally snags my hat and I chase it through the long grass, flapping my arms and shouting like the madman it promised it would make of me.

Both Sonder and Descendant are available to order from Bump Books.