Coil: Camera Light Oblivion
Ruth Bayer
160pp / 170mm x 220mm
+ 6 page fold out
Over 200 photos in colour and black & white
Limited edition hardback of 500, signed
Hardback
£45.00
Camera, Light, Oblivion incorporates a signed 166-page full colour, hardback book in a transparent dust jacket, a 32-page B&W chapbook, and a ‘flashing’ black nickel and enamel badge of the backdrop to the Time Machines performance, John Dee’s ‘Hieroglyphic Monad’.
Texts by Ruth Bayer and Mark Pilkington.
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I first met John Balance in 1988 at the photo session for the Current 93 album Earth Covers Earth, which I shot on Hampstead Heath in London. He was known to everyone as Geff (his birth name), and he wore a fabulous Hawaiian shirt to the session. That was the first time I photographed him, and the book you are now holding contains the last photos I took of him – and the only photos I took of his partner Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson.
- Ruth Bayer
This book is a time machine.
We’re thrilled to present this collection of photographs by Ruth Bayer, documenting Coil’s first live performances as a band between 2000 and 2002.
Ruth was granted unprecedented access to three live London performances – at the Royal Festival Hall, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and the Barbican – and was present both onstage and during behind-the-scenes preparations.
Ruth’s images capture both the method, and the madness, of Coil’s now-legendary live performances, and provide a unique window into this critical, final phase of Coil’s existence.
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About the author
Ruth Bayer is an Austrian photographer, based in London, whose work has been exhibited at galleries all over the world. Her photographs have appeared in numerous music and style magazines over the past two decades and most recently in the book The Play Goes On: The Rituals of the Rainbow Bridge.
