Night Blooms

"Night Blooms" is a combination of poetry and photography that is animated by the intention to re-conceive the local as a proper site of inquiry. This ambition contrasts with previous projects of mine - "Air Pressure," "In The Shadow of the Silent Mountain," "Some Memories of Bamboo," "Zawawa" - which have all found their location many thousands of miles from my home. These projects in which the distant is foregrounded connect to a long history of ethnographic and other forms of research practice - including arts practice - that are constituted by a field of operation which involves travel and encounters with the unfamiliar.

"Night Blooms" is apparently more akin to the genre of nature writing where what Geertz calls thick description makes the local available. Yet the texts, like those in another local work of mine, "A Downland Index," problematise this genre identification by engaging various literary devices such as the imposition of rules, constraints and citation.

The book has been collected by the Stills Centre for Photography.

Some poems from the book were published by Hotel. "Hotel is a magazine for new approaches to fiction, non fiction & poetry; and provides the space for experimental reflection on literature’s status as art & cultural mediator. The magazine is bi-annual, the online archive is updated periodically."

The book was reviewed in Photomonitor:
“Carlyle, meanwhile, is clear on process. The body of work was made on night runs through woodlands and public spaces distorted by darkness. His perspective feels more familiar, quite similar to my own. These are multiple pieced-together experiences of a world in a rush. For him, the ‘bloom’ is more than a flower. It is an umbrella term for a host of significant things discovered by Carlyle as he transgresses night time landscapes – a bloom of something from the darkness that calls to him, bringing forth brief encounters with plants, animals, structures, sometimes even people, as the writing that fills the first half of the book attests. The bloom, too, is the camera flash itself – the very means of discovering and capturing the images.

"Carlyle’s is much more experimental and in keeping with its exploratory content. ‘Night Blooms’ contains full-bleed single and near seamless double-page spreads, grids, formal centralised photographs, some of which are out of focus, and a number of partially layered images that seem to skip across the paper’s coated surfaces on clean white grounds. The layered pages, in particular, befit the publication’s assertion as a place where “territory, trails and terrain overlap and collide”, offering clues to deeper motivations for the project.

"The photographs printed in ‘Night Blooms’ likewise offer poppies, buttercups, thistles, bluebells and other botanical specimens as the title suggests. But spread across its pages are also tarpaulins, mattresses and other detritus, barbed wire fencing, a dead fox, a telegraph pole and rainbow-clouded smoke. Two images depict streaks of light that might be vehicle headlights or lampposts. The camera’s flash lights the dark photographs, often leaving visible vignette halos. The miscellaneous items of the world are open to (mis)interpretation. [It is] in ‘Night Blooms’ where the contemporary is truly foregrounded. Carlyle’s photographic encounters are clear evidence that wild nature is rare and seldom untouched by our presence.

"Nature can be a source of comfort and delight but it never stands still and it always fights back. Flowers don’t always bloom as we hope; everything looks different in the dark.”

• https://photomonitor.co.uk/essay/olby_ca...
• https://partisanhotel.co.uk/Angus-Carlyl...
• https://stills.org/