Dovecote (2010). From The Unseen: An Atlas of Infrared Plates - Limited Edition 1 of 12 Photograph

The photographs in the first part of photography book 'The Unseen: An Atlas of Infrared Plates (Schilt Publishing 2016) were made in Pluckley, Kent. Pluckley is recorded in the Domesday Book and is over 1000 years old. It's said to be the most haunted village in the U.K. Pluckley is host to a number of apparitions according to local myth with tales of a phantom horse and coach passing through the town, a General that roams through woods that no longer exist, a gypsy woman who set herself ablaze and various red ladies & white ladies who appear in St Nicholas's Churchyard. Some believe that ghosts could be revealed with the use of infrared photography. Under normal conditions we see a visible wavelength of light between 400-700 nanometers and that's the range of light most cameras record. Infrared film with the correct filtration can reveal light between 750-1000 nanometers. 'Aesthetically the colour shift of infrared film is genuinely eerie in itself; blood red foliage is the stuff of horror movies, or a sci-fi disruption of the cosy notions of England's green and pleasant lands.' - Holly Williams, The Independent New Review. The photographs of 'The Village' photographic series are visually uncanny; a product of the colour shift. Some panoramas seem truly alien, like they are from H.G Wells War of the Worlds. The subverted everyday of rural Kent: The Garden of England. Although no ghosts were revealed via the infrared process, the photographs and text instead reveal the psychogeography of the land. One of the photographs depicts 'The Devils Bush', a quiet image which invokes a brooding and menacing feel. Local legend portends to its ability to summon Lucifer if a ritual is performed naked at midnight. By knowing this tale it takes the viewer of the photograph somewhere else. That's the powerful connection between perception and knowledge - the more we see, the more we know, the more we know, the more we see. Work from this series has been exhibited at Christies in London, AAF Battersea, AAF Hampstead, Backlight Photo Festival in Germany, The Royal Engineers Museum in Gillingham and Lilford Gallery in Canterbury.