Photography

At last, yesterday I took a USB stick with all the images for the exhibition to the printers. The private view is June 4th, 5-7pm, Norwich Arts Centre. I am looking forward to seeing the large prints and hanging them. Also on the way is the catalogue for the exhibition, which will be made available here should anyone want to buy it.

Releasing excerpts from a novel that is nowhere near finished, along with photographs, is an interesting process. The snippets do not reveal much in the way of narrative in themselves, and yet I have the feeling that people will experience something more solid in their minds. We experience life and a great deal of creative entertainment through snippets and clips. There is no way anyone can read every interesting book published, or watch every film, or listen to every new album and watch every gig. And so filtered clips increasingly stand in for those experiences. By attending this exhibition, people will be able to retain the retina image of having actually seen the film, or read the novel, neither of which exist yet.

For me, the process has revealed more about the narrative of the novel and in particular the characters. I have made them real and watched them move and told them what to do in real life. And while the people in the images are my friends - people I see in every day life quite regularly for the most part - they now also co-exist as characters in the novel I am writing.

I also learned a lot about photography, something I've been interested in for a very long time since studying it at college back in the early 1980s. Photography has always been present in most things I've done. When I was a music journalist and a magazine editor, the whole deal was about creating a mix of words and pictures that gave an impression of what was actually happening, what it was like to be there. When I was at school – and I was trapped in a boarding school in Surrey, England, within spitting distance of London but it may as well have been a different planet – reading the NME and Melody Maker was a weekly immersive experience that ran like virtual reality in my head. When I read reports of David Bowie in Berlin, or about Sex Pistols gigs, or Kraftwerk in Dusseldorf, or Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath punching the Melody Maker's Allan Jones, I lived it, too.

That was 30 years ago. There's more of everything now. More music, more photographs, more words. too much to consume even just one per cent of it. My exhibition addresses time-poor culture seekers and also gives them something to look at while drinking the excellent coffee at the Arts Centre. If you can't make it to Norwich during June for some reason, the entire thing will be online soon.

Oh, and I didn't win the Arthur C Clarke Award.