Past-present -future

Double Exposures is a new collaborative venture between Manuel Vason and forty of the most visually arresting artists working with performance in the UK. Ten years after his first, groundbreaking book, Exposures, Vason has produced another extraordinary body of work, which sets out new ways of bridging performance and photography. For Double Exposures, Vason has worked with two groups of artists, using two distinct types of collaboration, to produce a series of double images. Artists who had previously worked with Vason were invited to create two images, one of their own practice and another, where they took on the role of the photographer, shaping an image with Vason’s body. A second group of new collaborators were invited to create a performance, which could be captured in two photographs. All the images exist as doubles – pairs – diptychs. Double Exposures includes commissioned essays on photography and performance by David Bate, David Evans, Dominic Johnson, Lois Keidan, Alice Maude-Roxby, Adrien Sina, Chris Townsend, and Joanna Zylinska and an interview with Helena Blaker. Themes explored include the body, the diptych, documentation, encounters, identity, mediation and the relationship between photography and performance. In photography, a ‘double exposure’ can be accidental or deliberate. Both types permeate Double Exposures, making it Manuel Vason’s most ambitious project to date. Double Exposures collaborators: Aaron Williamson, Áine Phillips, Alexandra Zierle & Paul Carter, Alistair MacLennan, Ansuman Biswas, Brian Catling, David Hoyle, Dickie Beau, Eloise Fornieles, Elvira Santamaría Torres, Ernst Fischer, Florence Peake, Franko B, Giovanna Maria Casetta, Harold Offeh, Helena Goldwater, Helena Hunter, Hugo Glendinning, Iona Kewney, jamie lewis hadley, Joshua Sofaer, Julia Bardsley, Katherine Arianello, Lucille Acevedo-Jones & Rajni Shah, Mad for Real, Marcia Farquhar, Marisa Carnesky, Martin O'Brien, Mat Fraser, Michael Mayhew, Mouse, Nando Messias, Nicola Canavan, Noëmi Lakmaier, Oreet Ashery, Rita Marcalo, Ron Athey, Sinead O'Donnell, Stacy Makishi, The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein, the vacuum cleaner Published with the support of Arts Council England Reviews 'Manuel Vason is to Performance Art what Robert Capa is to war photography.' – Franko B, artist 'Manuel Vason's images exist somewhere between portraiture, performance documentation, and documentary - or perhaps, his images are fashion shots, but the bodies are clothed in performance.' – Tracy Warr, independent curator, editor of The Artist's Body 'Manuel Vason's startling and stylised images, powerfully reproduced in Encounters, violently force bodily abjection into the arena of the sublime. Not since the era of Caravaggio and Bernini has pain been so exquisitely and beautifully rendered - here, through Vason's capacity to connect, via the red-hot wire of aesthetic reduction, to the bodies that wield and convey it.' – Amelia Jones 'Photography stages what it records; and subjects perform on that stage. In this age of the complicit auto-branding of the ‘Selfie’, it’s a relief to be reminded that the self and the camera are less knowable than we might think. In this book Manual Vason’s collaborative photographs along with a range of nimble writers reopen for us all the uncertainties and possibilities, the trapdoors and escape hatches that make the self and the camera such wild companions.' – David Campany, writer, curator and Reader in Photography at the University of Westminster, London

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Intellect in Double Exposures: Performance as Photography, Photography as Performance. It is included in this repository accordance with Intellect's green open access policy: https://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/page/index,name=Intellect+Open/

Double Exposures: Performance as Photography, Photography as Performance by Manuel Vason, edited by David Evans