Pentagonal Pool Revisited. Again

Here are two more of these "poster books", both derived from my ancient Pentagonal Pool project (which you can read about here). It's been enjoyable to revisit this old work, rather like discovering and trying on an old pair of jeans, and finding that they still fit (sadly, a very imaginary comparison in my case). It's poignant to recall not only how precious a daily hour of solitary daylight freedom (a.k.a. the "lunch break") was in those time-poor days of employment and family life, but also how this gave a high level of concentration to my photographic efforts, revisiting the same locations day after day. As many have observed, creativity thrives under constraints.

The first example is a relatively straightforward, decorative presentation of three of the multiple-image blocks from the original book, together with one of the quotations from Francis Bacon (no, not him, the other one, the frozen chicken man) that I used in the book. The second is more like a set of panels from a graphic novel, incorporating a frog skeleton I photographed in Paris a few years ago, and vaguely referencing the "Batrachomyomachia" ("The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice"), a comic (?) Ancient Greek epic, once attributed to Homer, that I used in an even earlier effort at sequencing my photographs of the bodies of water on Southampton University campus.

I know, I know... "Never knowingly unpretentious" is our motto. [1] Or at least it was back then: I seemed incapable of framing a photo-sequence without linking it implicitly or explicitly to some heavyweight cultural touchstones, quite often things I had come across in the course of my background "research", and had almost certainly never read before. Native ostentation aside, it's probably a reflection of my professional formation as a university librarian: you know about many times more fascinating things than you could ever absorb, where to find them, and how they fit into the broadest possible picture of human knowledge: you become a human signpost. In a favourite quotation from Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson:

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backs of books in libraries.

Those catalogues don't make themselves, of course. You're welcome, Sam. But right now it's my lunch break, and I have places to go, photos to take...

1. Non-British readers will probably not recognise the allusion to the motto of the John Lewis department stores: "never knowingly undersold".