John Deakin: Double Exposures and Modernism
Channel: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Date: 2016-07-22

The Look First feature represents a different kind of article to its companions in British Art Studies; one that is pre-eminently visual and necessarily collaborative, and that is made possible by the digital format of the journal.  

In this series of short films made by Jonathan Law, the art historian James Boaden, and the curator of The John Deakin Archive, Paul Rousseau, discuss the double-exposure images made by the photographer John Deakin (1912-1972) in the 1950s and 1960s. 

The films ask you, firstly, to look closely at the images being discussed. Each one begins with a sustained and intense shot of a single image before opening up to a wide-ranging discussion about Deakin, double exposures, and photography. 

This film explores John Deakin’s artistic development from the 1930s into the war years, contextualizing his work within a broader framework of 20th century Modernism. Presenting new research from the Tate Gallery Archives that connects Deakin to British photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer, it includes the discovery of an early double exposure that could have been taken by either photographer. Paul Rousseau and James Boaden take account of the surrealist elements of the double exposures, exploring connections to Francis Bacon’s Man in Blue series; and Jonathan Law presents Deakin’s double exposure portraits alongside a rich seam of others by artists including Degas, Duchamp and Picasso, positioning the time-based multiple planes within these photographs alongside the generation of cubism.