Connor Sewell — The Ilford Catalogue

The seemingly irreconcilable space between photography’s uncompromising objective procedures and its potential for human expression is what  Sewell investigates with The Ilford Catalogue. Sewell’s book questions how we perceive images in relation to the place in which they are found, and invites further questioning about how we consider the photograph’s scientific and objective basis, in the striving for new intimate visual narratives.

There was something enigmatic about my first encounter with Sewell’s book, which takes its name from the original publication prior to the artist’s revision. The Ilford Catalogue: this imposter, this printed masquerade which usurps the original publication, first appeared to me as something of a puzzle. The curious placement of images felt specific, yet uneasy, as if the images were uncomfortable in their own ink. Flicking through the catalogue was like caressing the edges of jigsaw pieces to a puzzle that doesn’t fit together.

Sewell’s The Ilford Catalogue is a volatile response to its original publication. Here, photographic science creates a paradoxical backdrop for Sewell’s moments of intimacy and curiosity.

Sewell was inspired by his chance finding of the catalogue which was discarded by his university’s library archives, reminding him of the spontaneous acquisitions of printed material in early surrealist experiments. For the artist this was a poetic turn of events, and a situation indicative of his growing desire to deviate from the technical norms of the photobook craft, in pursuit of new and unexpected image making outcomes. This tendency, combined with Sewell’s propensity for uncensored image making, makes this object a stolen prize, belligerent and uncompromising. Sewell’s The Ilford Catalogue is a volatile response to its original publication. Here, photographic science creates a paradoxical backdrop for Sewell’s moments of intimacy and curiosity. The artist’s diaristic photos become discarded anomalies remaining from a failed lab experiment.

Sewell’s wider practice is characterised by a search for experience and solace through a repetitive and convulsive examination of the people and places surrounding him. He photographs in the street, between destinations, always capturing the flavour of the rigmarole everyday and the freedoms of his youth. Often its architecture and landscape in new surroundings, capturing tells of unfamiliar culture, or encounters with strangers at parties or bars – the portrait for him is a gateway to connection with whom he sees. The artist also uses photography to preserve the people and places he cherishes, so as to not forget these moments that pass him by so quickly in the frantic dynamism of his early twenties. His camera allows him to live fast, and save all life from the catastrophe of the ever changing moment with the click of his camera. This explains the sheer volume of his archive.

Intimately intertwined with his own life, Sewell’s imagery (which exalts the raw, the defiant and the unbridled) upsets the logic of the original catalogue.

In keeping with a surrealist manner, the creation of Sewell’s repurposed book involved selecting pages from the original catalogue at random, before printing his own images onto them with no particular order in mind, welcoming the unpredictable connections that emerged. After Sewell subjects the catalogue pages to purposeful printing errors, he resequences the pages to indicate a sprawling investigation. Intimately intertwined with his own life, Sewell’s imagery (which exalts the raw, the defiant and the unbridled) upsets the logic of the original catalogue. His fingerprints, as he describes them, are mucky and the meeting of image on paper is abrupt and transgressive. The original catalogue is a manual for photo processing: chemical dilutions, correct use of equipment, processing times etc. The artist stages a subjective invasion of this photographic logic from the fortress of his own retina. We are initially left seeking to make connections between image and page which reveals as much as a xerox printer would if asked to explain itself.

As I methodically pass through the pages of Sewell’s new logic, I feel the desperation in his search for the metric by which to judge his own images, a search in which the artist regards himself to be a constant participant. Perhaps this explains the unpredictable superimpositions, the repetition at various distances from one another. We sense Sewell is glancing back at his imagery to learn something about himself, his choices, and the mistakes and pains along the way, which reemerge sometimes seemingly at random as they do in all of us. He is returning again with hope that his imagery holds the key to the solace he seeks. We sense with palpable tension, the dealings of a photographer who fears he can’t grasp or reconcile with what his images possess. 

This search for moral judgement and to understand himself through imagery, is something we also see in Sewell’s wider practice. In the case of the Ilford Catalogue, the search is a tentative, even sceptical one. For Sewell, the book is a sort of science experiment. Sewell says the work speaks to the uncompromising autonomy of the printer itself, for which he acts as co-pilot. With each page I turn I divulge further into a plea, or perhaps a promise of surrender to forces that cannot be controlled. The artist explains that it was important to the work for mistakes to be embraced during printing, allowing the final production to be partly a result of intelligence outside the photographer’s control. The moment the paper returns from the machine to the artist’s hands, his photos (and the associated promise of a connection shared) are rendered even more inaccessible, encrypted with the printer’s alien dialect. The printer has reflected the artist’s agony back to him. Approaching sequencing as if testing a hypothesis, he creates a synthesised melody, intuitive yet brutal. The artist selects pages to reveal or return to experience, perhaps out of infatuation, perhaps a kind of psychosis. Once again, Sewell subjects his humanity to the post-human. I’m left wondering whether it is the original catalogue, or his own images he wishes to see differently.

Sewell’s (re)creation of The Ilford Catalogue resonates most with me in what it reveals about our utilisation of photography in the present day. Now more than ever, photography is a tool used for comparison and validation of our experience. It is used to say: I had that experience, I met that person, I saw that place. In short it says ‘look, I’ve lived’, whether we’re playing spot the difference between our friends’ and our own Instagram feeds, or in our own archives — comparing how we felt then, to now. Photography saves up our every experience, and holds up our lives to scrutiny. Sewell’s lens offers us his life, but in the end it is forced to exist within parameters from which it simply cannot escape. The original publication reduces the attempt to express through the image to a formulaic banality, muffling the artist’s scream: a sobering reminder of photography’s deeply inhuman, haunting, technological basis. A dilemma arises with each turn of the page, with each self-devised automated betrayal of the co-pilot by the printer who at last speaks and says – I possess something that is no longer yours.

We sense with palpable tension, the dealings of a photographer who fears he can’t grasp or reconcile with what his images possess.

Perhaps Sewell’s The Ilford Catalogue seeks the authority its old title holds. By not changing it, maybe Sewell hopes to become it, to appear as the printed predecessor did: logical, orderly, intelligible to himself. Offering his personal image diary to technological devices in an attempt to see order in his own life. But ultimately Sewell achieves this through a subversion — discrediting the place in which the images are found by presenting imagery that acts like a glitch in the program. A trace of a scream that no one hears, but is impossible to ignore all the same


All Rights Reserved: Text © Harry Carter
 Images © Connor Sewell