We hope that all our listeners are crouched around their radio sets with the lights turned down low, for today we have a man who has walked in M R James’s footsteps (literally) and taken a touch of H P Lovecraft with him at the same time. Photographer and writer David Senior joins us, snatched from the Folk Horror Revival to talk about both his photography and his writing.
With the almost lost town of Dunwich in the news again, we are surprisingly timely in our posting. We do have a vested interest. Our own period horror story My Lips Shall Speak No More, concerning one of the legends of Dunwich, should be anthologised later this year.
If that weren’t enough, M R James, who set a number of his stories in East Anglia, is still the hottest medieval scholar and provost to hit the weird bookstands. And we shouldn’t ignore the Lovecraftian connection with regards to his The Dunwich Horror. He didn’t make that name up, you know.
“How much of this once populous city with ”fifty-two churches’ is left at the moment I will not undertake to say.” M R James
To cap it all, we grew up on a North Sea coastline similarly being dragged into the sea year on year (see whale-road, widow-maker ). If the Deep Ones wanted anywhere to hide, forget Innsmouth. There are plenty of drowned villages off the Yorkshire coast where they could share gutteral anecdotes and plan a day out in Hull. Ravenser Odd, now under the grey waves off Spurn Point, would seem a suitable host.
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David Senior has done extensive photographic work across East Anglia, and his pictorial path runs from moody, pastoral scenes, through ruined churches and all the way to modern dystopian decay, which means that his work has something for everybody. Not many kittens playing with balls of wool, though.
He’s a prolific photographer, so we’ve only been able to chose a few that caught our eye to illustrate his interview. His writing draws on today’s landscape and is edgy with menace, and we ask him about that as well. Do listen closely…
greydog: Welcome to greydogtales, David, and thanks for joining us. For those who don’t know you, we should really start with Eastscapes, which is the website you use to display the range of your photography. Your work on Eastscapes covers many aspects of East Anglia, from contemporary neglect to the broad landscape. Do you find the area has a particular vibe or feel to it, one which resonates with you?
david: Absolutely. I’m not a ‘native’ East Anglian – I’m originally from West Yorkshire, and moved to Norfolk when I went to university at 18. As soon as I began to explore the landscape of the city and the surrounding countryside, it began to have an increasing hold over me: there’s something about its location – jutting out by itself, on the road to nowhere, much of it rural, its coastlines eroding – that I find tremendously powerful. There’s a genuine sense of isolation in a lot of the landscape, yet with rich reams of history and meaning lurking beneath the surface.
greydog: We’re going to pretend to know something about photography, although we clearly don’t. Are you a hi-tech, expensive SLR expert weighed down with extra lenses, filters and sensors, or a quick digital sort of guy?
david: Quick, digital. I actually know very little about the physicality of photography, and far less about Photoshop and high-end digital techniques. Usually when I shoot it’s either with an iPhone or digital bridge camera. I appreciate the low economic barrier to entry with photography at the moment: if you have a phone, you have a camera. It allows the potential for capturing spontaneous imagery wherever you are without needing to think too far ahead, plan in advance, or have to be able to afford the necessary equipment. I like that.
greydog: What we see in many of your shots is a very bold, even stark capturing of light and dark. Does this mean that you deliberately trek out under certain weather and lighting conditions, or are these opportunistic shots taken as you go along?
david: Usually opportunistic: I think I’m simply drawn to places and imagery in which darkness somehow threatens to overwhelm the image. Even on sunny days, the shadows are the strongest… I often prefer heading out very early in the morning to shoot, though – I want to find landscapes devoid of people, which, even in Norfolk, can sometimes be tricky! Plus it puts me in a more appropriate mindset to shoot: feeling as if I have this silent world to myself, free from distraction or crowding. I photographed Norwich city centre on Christmas morning. It was emptier than I’ve ever known it, and of course my thoughts turned to post-apocalyptic, ‘28 Days Later’ scenarios…
greydog: Your site is sub-titled The Abandoned, the Forgotten and the Curious. This is immediately reminiscent of M R James, and of course you have photographed a number of sites mentioned by James in his guidebook ‘Suffolk and Norfolk’ (1930). Can we assume that you’re an enthusiast of his ghost stories as well?
david: I adore James’ stories, and if anything am perhaps even more fascinated by the 1970s BBC adaptations of his works for their ‘Ghost Story at Christmas’ series. Many of which were both set and filmed in this neck of the woods, so I’ve embarked upon the odd James pilgrimage from time to time! There is a variety in James’ work, and not everything is set in East Anglia, but recurring motifs do stick with me. Bleakness, loneliness, half-seen figures on an empty coastline. Even when not photographing anything explicitly ‘Jamesian’ – whatever that would even mean – his themes are almost always lurking there somewhere.
“Aldeburgh…has a special charm for those who, like myself, have known it since childhood; but I do not find it easy to put that charm into words.” M R James
“…no finer ruin is to be found in Norfolk.” M R James
greydog: It might be worth mentioning that we came across you initially through a connection with folk-horror, an area of growing interest and examination. Perhaps we should put you on the spot by asking what the term means to you personally.
david: There doesn’t seem to be a strict definition of folk horror, which is fine with me. I find it handy to see it as a vague umbrella term which covers aspects of a horror aesthetic which refers back to our more rural, folk-culture roots. That difficult-to-define uneasiness that one can feel simply walking through an otherwise picturesque village out in the middle of nowhere. I don’t necessarily think folk horror as a term has to be limited to the British Isles, but there’s a great deal of the British collective imagery tied up in it. Pagan vibes nestling alongside derelict Christian churches, scarecrows and sinister villages and forgotten copses.
greydog: Now, on to your writing. Do your photographs inspire your fiction, or are they two strands which you keep separate?
david: Intertwined. The locations I photograph make their ways into my writing, and I hunt out locations to photograph that resemble the locations in my head. The Sinners of Crowsmere is punctuated with black and white photography, and one chapter is little more than a series of descriptions of faded Polaroids found in an old box. I try and write how I think my photographs would sound, if that doesn’t come across as horrendously pretentious!
greydog: Your first novella, The Sinners of Crowsmere, has been described as transgressive, art-house and Jamesian (“Highly recommended… Wonderful arthouse / video nasty vibe on the Norfolk coast” – M. R. James Podcast). As we’re not sure what those terms mean when bundled together, can you give listeners a brief idea of what themes they might find in the novella?
david: It’s a sparse book, slight, spindly, haunted by ghosts literal and figurative. Yet it’s also about people in a small town, and the flaws and weaknesses that make us who we are: depression, violence, obsession, boredom, regret.
greydog: You then went on to write Agony Pages. We cover a lot of Lovecraftian influences on greydogtales, and Agony Pages certainly has some of that feel. Did this spring from an existing interest in Lovecraft and similar writers?
david: I’m a sucker for Lovecraft and I’m a sucker for video nasty and gore culture. That indescribable thrill you’d get as a kid when you got your hands on some unmarked VHS cassette that had been copied off some friend’s older brother, and that promised untold violence and nudity… Agony Pages is an unabashed delving into the appeal of the sleazier side of horror. Whereas Lovecraft had sinister grimoires unfit for human eyes, the equivalent here are underground porno mags of mythical reputation that allow glimpses into darker and grosser worlds. It’s not particularly gory or explicit in itself, but all that gloopier, nastier stuff is lingering round the edges.
greydog: And as we like to look forward, we usually ask this. What might we expect from you in the future – more photographic work, more fiction or both.
david: Both. And hopefully together! I photograph constantly, even if I update my blog less frequently than I should. I’m working on the follow-up to Crowsmere, amongst other things, and am still trying to piece together a horror novel told entirely through photographs… Which may take a while, admittedly, but I’ll get there. Until then, I’ll just continue to wander with my camera and my notebook, trying to capture that indefinable sense of weird.
greydog: Many thanks, David.
You can find more of his work on his website eastscapes, and a link for The Sinners of Crowsmere is up on the sidebar now, under Things of Interest.
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Given our concurrent nautical weird theme and our last post (see stranger seas three), we had to add one more of M R James’s comment, from his Anglian guidebook:
“A merman was caught at Orford in the thirteenth century, and kept for some time.”
So there.
At the end of this week: It’s Scary Women 2, a double interview with UK horror writers Laura Mauro and Victoria Leslie. We might still have a midweek medley though, so stay in touch.
