Overview

Paddy Summerfield's Home Movie tells the oldest story, the saddest story, a story that includes the story-teller. It is the Fall of Man, falling from innocence into exile, a dark world of claustrophobic interiors, of low life bars and stained streets, of casual fornication in shabby hotel rooms. It is the fall from grace into forbidden spaces, where secrets fester behind closed doors and weary eyes. And it is a fall into nightmare and psychosis, where the self, in sickness, peoples the world with terrors. These are squalid scenes, such as Dostoevsky might have recognised, expressing the madness and obsession of those imprisoned there. Even looking at such a world, at such pictures, feels transgressive. Home Movie leads us into darkness, but the journey is always a search, suggested by the final pictures moving away from corrosive indulgences and pain towards enlightenment. The last sequence starts with hands praying, in a gesture of remorse and contrition. Then the came

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9781911306771

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Oxford-based, Paddy Summerfield, trained at Guildford School of Art in the Photography and the Film departments. Photographs he took in 1967, when still a first year student, were published in Album, and spreads in Creative Camera received encouraging recognition. Summerfield first exhibited in London in the late 1960s, and has shown at many galleries, including the ICA, The Barbican, The Serpentine Gallery, and The Photographers' Gallery. In 1976, Sir Nicholas Serota (then director of MOMA, Oxford) invited Summerfield to exhibit Beneath The Dreaming Spires, his first one-man show. His work is held in the collections of the Arts Council and of the V&A, as well as in numerous private collections.

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