Night Blooms Angus Carlyle

Out of print

Front cover of the book, Night Blooms, by Angus Carlyle.

Selected by Stills Centre for Photography and University of the Arts London for their collections

Carlyle’s photographic encounters are clear evidence that wild nature is rare and seldom untouched by our presence. Flowers don’t always bloom as we hope; everything looks different in the dark.

Photomonitor

About the book

Angus Carlyle’s Night Blooms collects nocturnal explorations of an area of woodland close to his home on the South Coast of England. Poetic prose and photographic experiments document Carlyle’s chosen medium of running, an everyday act he has repeated across specific trails in solitude for years. In Night Blooms, public space becomes unrecognised – trespassed underfoot and collected. We encounter the smells, noises, the presence of inhabitants; bats, a nightjar, laughter, concrete. A head torch provides a prism of vignetted light and acts as a portable studio, like a lantern to the understory of a secret yet shared space. Everyday objects take on a new status – shrine-like, sinister, glowing. The exhale of breath, bad weather, a deflated bouncy castle are seemingly snatched at pace from the air. If there is a constant character here, it is the blooms which remain more familiar, unwieldily and delicate. Night Blooms takes us up high – as territory, trails and terrain overlap and collide, re-assembled glimpses offer study caught in motion.

Part of the Hotel Archive

Collections: The British Library, Bodleian Library Oxford University, The Cambridge University Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales and Trinity College Dublin.

A photograph of Angus Carlyle by the Thames River

Praise

Pointillist zooms, far-echoing found sounds, mysterious and charged photographic images: Night Blooms is a force field that seduces and singes.

Sukhdev Sandhu author of Night Haunts

Night Blooms presents the exquisite traces of the night-runner as artist. Often an urgent poetry of action, yet with The delicate / Appearance of wreathes of smoke. Here is the runner’s pain of mantras drained empty, but also faith in the solidity of the world.

Mark Goodwin

Night Blooms teaches us that it is only through meaningful dialogue with our surroundings that we truly come to know them. This is an intimate, kinetic document of the South Coast woodlands; while the rest of us are sleeping Night Blooms is off, sharing moments with the night.

Isobel Anderson

Angus Carlyle’s woodland interventions leave the viewer with suggestions of other agendas that words and photographs cannot alone reveal

David Moore
Night Blooms by Angus Carlyle

Press

About the author

Angus Carlyle is interested in landscape and in other things besides. He works collaboratively and on his own. Publications include On Listening (co-edited with Cathy Lane), Autumn Leaves (as editor), A Downland Index and In The Shadow of the Silent Mountain.

Night Blooms 'look through'
Angus Carlyle reads from Night Blooms
The Undarks

Specification

Format
Paperback
Trim Size
210 x 168 mm
Pagination
64 pp
Illustrations Colour
50 colour
Publication Date
1 May 2020
ISBN
978-1-9160608-5-2
Production Spec
Loop binding, full colour, litho print
Trade Categories
Poetry, Photography, Landscape