Mark Borthwick: "Photography Is an Incredibly Beautiful Way of Listening"

"There is a light that inflitrates the world when we create spaciousness - when we let life happen of its own volition. Mark Borthwick knows this light well: it leaks, flares and spills across his photographs. He has always embraced errors as apertures, reminders that the most revealing moments are the ones never planned."

"If his new book is titled Out of Date - a reference to Pola Pan, a now-extinct 35mm black-and-white Polaroid film, that he used to photograph Paris and New York throughout the 1980s and 90s - it is perhaps more fitting to understand it as beyond date, beyond time: his photography and poetry forming a portal along the lemniscate of life . "You learn that because you document the same things over the years, everything you love, you're actually just documenting a mirror image of yourself," he says."

Mark Borthwick's photography and poetry foregrounds light, chance, and spaciousness, with leaks, flares and spills transforming errors into apertures that reveal unplanned, intimate moments. He used the now-extinct Pola Pan 35mm black-and-white Polaroid film to document Paris and New York in the 1980s and 90s, producing work that feels beyond linear time. Childhood experiences in the English countryside and encounters with the spiritual—voices, fairies and later plant medicine—shaped a practice that values instinctual attention and listening over intellectual meaning-making. Creation emerges from making space, letting life happen, and recognizing that repeated documentation reflects a mirror image of the self.

Read at AnOther