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Push Process
More speed, more light, more time.
But this is the fastest possible film, pushed as hard as it can be pushed; the lens wide open to catch every drop of brightness; the slow exposure shaking the image apart. Right up at the edge.
Go farther, closer.
Venice, 2000.
Richard is a postgraduate student living in the city to research its past. He’s supposed to be working in the archive, but he meets Merlo and Lars, two art students who are more interested in Venice’s present. He decides to pick up a camera and join them.
The world comes alive for Richard through photographs: for the first time, he feels connected to a place – and other people. He’s determined to continue, whatever the cost.
Push Process is a novel about art, friendship and being European, illustrated with over fifty black-and-white photographs of Venice.
But this is the fastest possible film, pushed as hard as it can be pushed; the lens wide open to catch every drop of brightness; the slow exposure shaking the image apart. Right up at the edge.
Go farther, closer.
Venice, 2000.
Richard is a postgraduate student living in the city to research its past. He’s supposed to be working in the archive, but he meets Merlo and Lars, two art students who are more interested in Venice’s present. He decides to pick up a camera and join them.
The world comes alive for Richard through photographs: for the first time, he feels connected to a place – and other people. He’s determined to continue, whatever the cost.
Push Process is a novel about art, friendship and being European, illustrated with over fifty black-and-white photographs of Venice.
224 pages, Paperback
Published March 6, 2024
1 person is currently reading
28 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 16, 2024
Venice By Night
Review of the Ortac Press paperback edition (March 6, 2024).
This is a very unique novel which takes the author's own photographs of Venice made between 2000 and 2008 and constructs a fictional story to go with them. The Part 1 novel section is followed by a Part 2 photo-essay of 50 pages which lets a selection of photographs tell their own story without words.
Richard has gone to Venice to do research for his graduate degree but gradually becomes more interested in photography and the art world through the friends that he meets along the way. He begins to experiment with different cameras and photography methods, including the title film process which is a term that describes underexposing film and then compensating for it later in the development process. The photographs are mostly taken at night and although many of the standard tourist locations are used, they are primarily off the beaten track. So we have people in bars, people riding the vaporetto water taxis, vaporetto stop locations, the bridges and canals and the churches photographed at odd angles and times.
View of the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute in Venice, Italy. Image sourced from the Author's Blog.
This was a 5 star book for me due to its unique character, location and themes of the discovery of art and place. I read Push Process as the February 2024 selection from the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month (BotM) club. Subscriptions to the BotM support the annual Republic of Consciousness Prize for small independent publishers.
Soundtrack
Alberto d’Amico’s “Ariva i barbari” (The Barbarians are Coming) (1973) is mentioned a few times in the book. You can listen to it on YouTube here. The Venetian dialect lyrics are provided in the comments or you can see them at Lyrics Translate. The Venetian dialect does not google translate very well directly into English, but if you take the Italian translation as the source, it works reasonably well.
Trivia and Links
There is a generous selection of background and additional images at the author's blog which you can see here.
There is an audio introduction to the book by the author along with a sample selection of photographs which you can listen to and watch on YouTube here.
Review of the Ortac Press paperback edition (March 6, 2024).
Photography was a gambling game too. Merlo had taught him that. Each exposure was an attempt to define the difference between winning and losing - an arbitrary and absolute distinction, which only mattered because the players decided to agree it did. The machine registered every scene with equal indifference, just as the roulette wheel didn't care where the ball landed. But in this game the uncontrollable element lay in not being able to define a winning move in advance. You had to figure out later if and why you'd won.
This is a very unique novel which takes the author's own photographs of Venice made between 2000 and 2008 and constructs a fictional story to go with them. The Part 1 novel section is followed by a Part 2 photo-essay of 50 pages which lets a selection of photographs tell their own story without words.
Richard has gone to Venice to do research for his graduate degree but gradually becomes more interested in photography and the art world through the friends that he meets along the way. He begins to experiment with different cameras and photography methods, including the title film process which is a term that describes underexposing film and then compensating for it later in the development process. The photographs are mostly taken at night and although many of the standard tourist locations are used, they are primarily off the beaten track. So we have people in bars, people riding the vaporetto water taxis, vaporetto stop locations, the bridges and canals and the churches photographed at odd angles and times.
View of the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute in Venice, Italy. Image sourced from the Author's Blog.
This was a 5 star book for me due to its unique character, location and themes of the discovery of art and place. I read Push Process as the February 2024 selection from the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month (BotM) club. Subscriptions to the BotM support the annual Republic of Consciousness Prize for small independent publishers.
Soundtrack
What are you looking for? Lucia asked.
Alberto D’Amico, Merlo said. She slid the cassette out and opened the case. This is Venetian folk music, she said to Richard as she placed it into the deck on her hi-fi.
A lone acoustic guitar and a voice – it could have been recorded at any point in the last fifty years. Richard said, I’ve never hear someone speak dialect. Cavaio? Is that – cavallo?
He’s Venetian, Lucia said. So obviously the barbarians are on horses.
…
Can you translate the song? Merlo asked her.
It’s about the founding of Venice, after the fall of the Roman Empire. Lucia stopped to listen and everyone else fell silent. So the singer’s escaping from the mainland, and he hopes the lagoon will be a land of plenty where his nets are always full.
Alberto d’Amico’s “Ariva i barbari” (The Barbarians are Coming) (1973) is mentioned a few times in the book. You can listen to it on YouTube here. The Venetian dialect lyrics are provided in the comments or you can see them at Lyrics Translate. The Venetian dialect does not google translate very well directly into English, but if you take the Italian translation as the source, it works reasonably well.
Trivia and Links
There is a generous selection of background and additional images at the author's blog which you can see here.
There is an audio introduction to the book by the author along with a sample selection of photographs which you can listen to and watch on YouTube here.
October 27, 2024
It's not just the film, Merlo had said, a week back, when she was explaining how it worked. The whole thing's magic.
It was magic, he'd replied. When they invented it, thirty years ago.
But nobody's improved this — they bypassed it. Like old science fiction: an obsolete version of the future.
Can I borrow it?
Maybe it's been waiting there for you.
Push Process is the third novel, and fourth book by Jonathan Walker, and the second I have read after the fascinating The Angels of L19, published by Weatherglass Press.
That novel merged evangelical Christianity, presented unusually sympathetically for UK literary fiction, with horror based on more speculative theology, against the background of 1980s Liverpool.
But was perhaps less representative of his work which primarily centres around the city of Venice, his other books being:
- Five Wounds: An Illuminated Novel, a fantasy set in a fairy-tale version of Venice
- Pistols! Treason! Murder!: The Rise and Fall of a Master Spy - an unconventional biography of a Venetian spy
This is also the latest book from the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month club which raises the fund that support the UKs most exciting annual book prize as well as showcasing a collection of books from the vibrant small independent press scene.
Push Process, set in 2000-1, is narrated from the perspective of Richard. He is in Venice, researching for his history PhD, specialising in spies and surveillance in the city in the early 17th century. He studies papers in Venice’s archives but develops the idea of using photographs to document the present-day status of the itineraries of the informants that the city employed to follow foreign embassy staff.
Pretending to be a spy with a Polaroid camera wasn't the sort of thing the Cambridge Faculty of History approved of; nor, he imagined, did their equivalent in Venice, where even undergraduates did a dissertation based on archival research. But couldn't the present be 'like' the past, metaphorically? In a metaphor, 'is' was a way to articulate difference as well as similarity.
In the MA seminar on Theory and Practice last year, Richard had discovered the critic Walter Benjamin, whose aphorisms went off like the flash on the Spectra. Not for nothing have Atget's photographs been likened to the scene of a crime. But is not every square inch of our cities the scene of a crime?
Who was Atget? Richard went to the UL and found a book of his empty photographs of Paris from the early zoos. Then in Venice, when he saw the camera in Merlo's bedroom, it reminded him of Benjamin's words. Didn't crime-scene photographers use Polaroids? It made sense, because the image couldn’t be altered or manipulated. The print was discrete and self-contained. It stuck to the thing it represented. But it also peeled away as it passed through the camera rollers, like an encrusted bandage, pulling away from a wound. And every square inch of Venice was certainly a crime scene, if you went back far enough.
The story that follows is a fascinating hybrid of:
- art history, specifically the art of photography, and how it might relate to history;
- a relatively straightforward 'coming-to-adulthood' student story, as Richard forms a tentative relationship with a Dutch art student and her friends and wonders about his post PhD future;
- a portrayal of Venice, although the city as it is rather than just the tourist traps, in both words and pictures;
- the mechanics of photographical techniques.
On the last of these, the novel's title comes from a photographic technique of intentionally underexposing a film and then compensating for it during development. Apparently. As I can't say I really know what that means - never having used anything other than a point-and-shoot camera, and then taken by film to Boots, in the analogue days - and that does highlight one feature of this novel - there is a lot of detail about different film techniques. I felt at times like someone who hadn't ever been to church or lived through the 80s might have felt reading The Angels of L19, which was much more personally resonant.
On the other hand, my favourite part of the novel were the photographs themselves - almost 50 in all. And the accompanying sections, interspersed between the third-person story, commenting on some of these photograph. One example:
Pick the past up and put it to use — but not to make something new To make something that's already old, even though it didn't exist a moment ago. The bridge at Rialto dates from the sixteenth century, but surely the steps and pavement have been resurfaced since then? Either way, they're -worn from decades or centuries of feet. Electric lights at the summit since — maybe the 1920s? — but they must have been upgraded and rewired. The metal shutters, the canvas awnings — twenty years old ? And they go up and down in a daily cycle. The Christmas lights have been here for two months. The commune leaves them up through January because they're going to be switched back on during Carnival, but in the meantime, they're dark. Lots of people too. You just can't see them, because once the exposure goes over one second, objects in motion begin to erase themselves. Not erase; repress. Because they're not removed. They're shifted below the camera's threshold of attention, into the optical unconscious. Different timescales: different kinds of presence.
Not every element will work for every read, but a very worthwhile - and beautiful - book.
The publisher
Ortac Press is an independent book publisher based in London. Ortac specialises in non-fiction writing on art, culture, music and social science. The press publishes a variety of novels too. We aim to publish books that are illuminating, captivating and relatable.
It was magic, he'd replied. When they invented it, thirty years ago.
But nobody's improved this — they bypassed it. Like old science fiction: an obsolete version of the future.
Can I borrow it?
Maybe it's been waiting there for you.
Push Process is the third novel, and fourth book by Jonathan Walker, and the second I have read after the fascinating The Angels of L19, published by Weatherglass Press.
That novel merged evangelical Christianity, presented unusually sympathetically for UK literary fiction, with horror based on more speculative theology, against the background of 1980s Liverpool.
But was perhaps less representative of his work which primarily centres around the city of Venice, his other books being:
- Five Wounds: An Illuminated Novel, a fantasy set in a fairy-tale version of Venice
- Pistols! Treason! Murder!: The Rise and Fall of a Master Spy - an unconventional biography of a Venetian spy
This is also the latest book from the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month club which raises the fund that support the UKs most exciting annual book prize as well as showcasing a collection of books from the vibrant small independent press scene.
Push Process, set in 2000-1, is narrated from the perspective of Richard. He is in Venice, researching for his history PhD, specialising in spies and surveillance in the city in the early 17th century. He studies papers in Venice’s archives but develops the idea of using photographs to document the present-day status of the itineraries of the informants that the city employed to follow foreign embassy staff.
Pretending to be a spy with a Polaroid camera wasn't the sort of thing the Cambridge Faculty of History approved of; nor, he imagined, did their equivalent in Venice, where even undergraduates did a dissertation based on archival research. But couldn't the present be 'like' the past, metaphorically? In a metaphor, 'is' was a way to articulate difference as well as similarity.
In the MA seminar on Theory and Practice last year, Richard had discovered the critic Walter Benjamin, whose aphorisms went off like the flash on the Spectra. Not for nothing have Atget's photographs been likened to the scene of a crime. But is not every square inch of our cities the scene of a crime?
Who was Atget? Richard went to the UL and found a book of his empty photographs of Paris from the early zoos. Then in Venice, when he saw the camera in Merlo's bedroom, it reminded him of Benjamin's words. Didn't crime-scene photographers use Polaroids? It made sense, because the image couldn’t be altered or manipulated. The print was discrete and self-contained. It stuck to the thing it represented. But it also peeled away as it passed through the camera rollers, like an encrusted bandage, pulling away from a wound. And every square inch of Venice was certainly a crime scene, if you went back far enough.
The story that follows is a fascinating hybrid of:
- art history, specifically the art of photography, and how it might relate to history;
- a relatively straightforward 'coming-to-adulthood' student story, as Richard forms a tentative relationship with a Dutch art student and her friends and wonders about his post PhD future;
- a portrayal of Venice, although the city as it is rather than just the tourist traps, in both words and pictures;
- the mechanics of photographical techniques.
On the last of these, the novel's title comes from a photographic technique of intentionally underexposing a film and then compensating for it during development. Apparently. As I can't say I really know what that means - never having used anything other than a point-and-shoot camera, and then taken by film to Boots, in the analogue days - and that does highlight one feature of this novel - there is a lot of detail about different film techniques. I felt at times like someone who hadn't ever been to church or lived through the 80s might have felt reading The Angels of L19, which was much more personally resonant.
On the other hand, my favourite part of the novel were the photographs themselves - almost 50 in all. And the accompanying sections, interspersed between the third-person story, commenting on some of these photograph. One example:
Pick the past up and put it to use — but not to make something new To make something that's already old, even though it didn't exist a moment ago. The bridge at Rialto dates from the sixteenth century, but surely the steps and pavement have been resurfaced since then? Either way, they're -worn from decades or centuries of feet. Electric lights at the summit since — maybe the 1920s? — but they must have been upgraded and rewired. The metal shutters, the canvas awnings — twenty years old ? And they go up and down in a daily cycle. The Christmas lights have been here for two months. The commune leaves them up through January because they're going to be switched back on during Carnival, but in the meantime, they're dark. Lots of people too. You just can't see them, because once the exposure goes over one second, objects in motion begin to erase themselves. Not erase; repress. Because they're not removed. They're shifted below the camera's threshold of attention, into the optical unconscious. Different timescales: different kinds of presence.
Not every element will work for every read, but a very worthwhile - and beautiful - book.
The publisher
Ortac Press is an independent book publisher based in London. Ortac specialises in non-fiction writing on art, culture, music and social science. The press publishes a variety of novels too. We aim to publish books that are illuminating, captivating and relatable.
March 10, 2024
Sometimes a book comes along at just the right time and throws you back into step. Push Process was one of those.
Inimitable and provocative, this is a unique jaunt into photography and art theory. It follows a History PhD student named Richard as he moves to Venice for archive research into the past.
Yet it's two Art students Merlo and Lars who pull him into the present - handing a camera into his lap, and beginning a complex yet beautiful journey.
'All these things exist in the gap that opens up between the camera's attention and my perception. It's always there, that gap. What photography's for: to explore it, to articulate it as precisely as possible'.
There is something overwhelmingly poignant in Richard's journey. A restlessness both in his desire to capture the right photograph, and as metaphor for obtaining purpose and a sense of reality in his own life.
The camera provides solace. A certain perspective, not only in the explicit sense of photography techniques, but also as a vessel in capturing meaningful and purposeful ways of living. His aloofness is quite endearing; his upbringing haunting - the camera serving as a window into past, present and what lies ahead.
Thanks to Henry at Cortac Press for the copy. Looking forward to exploring more of Walker's work.
Inimitable and provocative, this is a unique jaunt into photography and art theory. It follows a History PhD student named Richard as he moves to Venice for archive research into the past.
Yet it's two Art students Merlo and Lars who pull him into the present - handing a camera into his lap, and beginning a complex yet beautiful journey.
'All these things exist in the gap that opens up between the camera's attention and my perception. It's always there, that gap. What photography's for: to explore it, to articulate it as precisely as possible'.
There is something overwhelmingly poignant in Richard's journey. A restlessness both in his desire to capture the right photograph, and as metaphor for obtaining purpose and a sense of reality in his own life.
The camera provides solace. A certain perspective, not only in the explicit sense of photography techniques, but also as a vessel in capturing meaningful and purposeful ways of living. His aloofness is quite endearing; his upbringing haunting - the camera serving as a window into past, present and what lies ahead.
Thanks to Henry at Cortac Press for the copy. Looking forward to exploring more of Walker's work.
March 9, 2024
Haunting. Haunted. Brilliant
March 19, 2025
Richard is a Cambridge student who has moved to Venice in order to study espionage (not techniques, literally, as a subject) but then a comes across a camera and his life changes: he now wants to document Venice and incorporate it in his thesis. Whether this can happen is another story.
Push Process (it’s a technique of overdeveloping film) is a unique book: it’s quite plot heavy but it incorporates philosophy of art, namely the role photography plays in society. It’s also a book of national identity; when one is an outsider in a European country, despite living on the same continent.
The second half of the book contains’Richard’s’ portfolio , thus turning Push Process into a work of art in itself. Highly recommended.
Push Process (it’s a technique of overdeveloping film) is a unique book: it’s quite plot heavy but it incorporates philosophy of art, namely the role photography plays in society. It’s also a book of national identity; when one is an outsider in a European country, despite living on the same continent.
The second half of the book contains’Richard’s’ portfolio , thus turning Push Process into a work of art in itself. Highly recommended.
April 14, 2024
I loved the story and the concept of this novel by Jonathan Walker. Steeped in Venice and in photography, Richard is a lost soul. I’m not sure he exactly finds himself but I thoroughly enjoyed his journey. Stark but visual. The photography is stunning.
September 18, 2024
An interesting exploration of what photography does and what it can do. It's get a bit technical at certain points, but smart insights kept my attention.
May 5, 2024
An immersive account of the ‘visiting student’ side of Venice with a side of photography. I’d have liked the pictures in the second half to be more weaved into the narrative but it was a good read.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews