Occult Photography & Photography of the Occult
With the release of my book Arcanum a door of enquiry was opened by those who wished to learn more about the nature of the photographs and how they could better understand what they were attempting to convey. In conversation a common point raised was that the images were not what had initially been expected and that their curiosity had been piqued. In late 2019 I had the wonderful opportunity to meet up with Peter Mark Adams, author of Mystai and Game of Saturn, who had arranged a get together in Liverpool to talk about his new book (which I highly recommend by the way, Mystai is currently available from Scarlet Imprint). He asked if I would speak a little about Arcanum and the history behind the book and so it was that I introduced some folks to some of the differences between occult photography and photography of the occult.
Photography of the occult has been the main staple of this medium for many years now and has become the expected norm when talking about photographic work in this field. These are images that can be taken either by someone who is a practitioner or by someone who is just inspired by the occult. The image itself is more often than not what you could call ‘a view from the outside’, a capture of what the occult is ‘thought’ to be in the popular mind and not necessarily what it actually is. In this form of photography you will find many tropes prevalent from scarcely clad women, to skulls, bones and burning incense. These make for some fantastic photos, can be very powerful and evocative in their own right and can convey useful information or inspiration to the viewer. They are however photographs whose purpose is to have you the viewer look in, for you to bring to the table any meaning you might have a predisposition towards and to apply it to what you are seeing. These images make for a useful exercise in understanding yourself and where you are coming from, to explore your own bias through another medium.
These however are not occult photographs.
Occult photography is first and foremost a shift in direction and this is done in a manner of different ways. The shift is that of the image not offering you a space to explore what you are bringing but instead to make that process stop, to halt your ego, so that the image itself can instead project itself to you and in turn have you explore a different concept altogether. This is why many images that are occult photographs are not so obvious and can easily pass as ‘just a photo’ with confusion as to why it is deemed occult. This is approached by firstly allowing the subject to emanate itself and for the photographer to not set out with the intention of capturing a specific concept.
I first started this process with my photography in general when many years ago an old friend who was walking with me as I was taking photographs watched me as I set about capturing an image of a well known standing stone. He jovially said “I always find when visiting curious places like this that the stone itself is an intentional distraction to stop you turning around and looking at the really interesting things”, to which I turned around and witnessed some of the best cloud breaching sun rays I had ever seen. It was from that day forward that started to make a point of turning, of looking at things differently, especially when something seemed obvious. Occult photography is firstly about turning away from the obvious and allowing the rest to shine through - to transgress.
Another aspect of occult photography is layers of meaning whereby the image, once it has your attention, leads you down a path of realisation until you eventually take your leave with a touch of the experience remaining. The photographer it could be said works heavily with sympathetic magic in this regard and the triggers of awakening are encoded into the shapes and form of the photograph. Below is an example that I will leave you with, an image from Arcanum that has a number of aspects to explore beyond the immediately obvious.
Both hardback and paperback editions of Arcanum are still available from Anathema Publishing.
