In Camera

by Nicholas Royle, David Gledhill (Artist)

East Germany, the Cold War. A doctor’s daughter experiments with her father’s camera and eavesdrops on his consultations.

In their paintings and fiction, David Gledhill and Nicholas Royle explore the nature of surveillance, in this, the fourth publication by Negative Press London.

Genres: Fiction

48 pages, Paperback

First published May 10, 2016

About the author

Nicholas Royle is an English writer. He is the author of seven novels, two novellas and a short story collection. He has edited sixteen anthologies of short stories. A senior lecturer in creative writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, he also runs Nightjar Press, publishing original short stories as signed, limited-edition chapbooks. He works as a fiction reviewer for The Independent and the Warwick Review and as an editor for Salt Publishing.

Reviews

[Terry Pitts · Rating 2 out of 5]

Before getting to the substance of the book, it has an important backstory that needs to be understood. British painter David Gledhill acquired a flea market photo album that had once belonged to an East German family. He began making large monochrome paintings of some of the photographs from the album. Then his friend the writer Nicholas Royce decided to create a short story or novella out of some of the images. The result is In Camera, which reproduces about two dozen of Gledhill's photorealist paintings, each closely mimicking the look of vintage sepia photographs. Royce's "story" consists of fragments - childhood memories of the daughter surreptitiously using her father's camera and also overhearing family conversations that she doesn't always comprehend. Other fragments take place after the reunification of Germany as the daughter tries to understand if her father - a physician - had cooperated with the Stasi. Gledhill's paintings are the real stars of the book. At first glance they appear to be photographs, but Gledhill slightly exaggerates certain aspects of the images in a manner that makes them slightly threatening, very noirish. Royce's accompanying story doesn't match the level of the images.

But I loved the concept of the book, the idea of painstakingly reproducing snapshots in oil paint and then inserting them into a text as if they were the original photographs.