'Unreliable Evidence...'

About

Further photographic revelations from the most recently restored plates by the 19th century 'proto-surrealist' and photographic pioneer Samuel Heracles Gascoigne-Simpson.

Samuel Heracles Gascoigne-Simpson used photography as a method of capturing his own very unusual and distinct way of seeing the world. 

As well as utilising it to document his own and fellow inventors extraordinary 19th century contraptions, he also used it in an attempt to illustrate the subconscious some fifty years before Andre Breton coined the term 'Surrealism'. 

By a self developed method of 'auto hypnosis' (and also by consuming huge quantities of cheese before sleep), Gascoigne-Simpson endeavoured to obtain a trance like state from which his creative subconscious was free to roam at will, - later employing these ideas as the basis of some of his most significant images. 

None of the pictures exhibited here were ever published during his lifetime. Fearing scandal due to the (for the time) often indecorous and salacious nature of the images, the Gascoigne-Simpson family kept their eccentric and unorthodox relative's bizarre work hidden from public sight for almost a century. Following the recent death of an aunt, a quantity of glass plates was very recently discovered by the creator's great grandson Nick Simpson (himself a photographer), who has made it his mission to bring this wonderful body of work to a wider audience.

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