Iain Sinclair is a writer, film-maker and a prodigious walker who has always been drawn to outsiders and the telling periphery of things – from his book London Orbital, about circumnavigating the M25, to Edge of the Orison, about outlawed poet John Clare, and now Pariah Genius, about John Deakin (1912-1972), the relatively underexposed photographer who captured a Soho crowd that included Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon (Deakin’s photos were the basis for several of Bacon’s paintings). The book is a startling piece of psychogeography: exhaustively researched and developed in the dark room of Sinclair’s imagination.
What was your first encounter with John Deakin?
I first encountered him through his prophetic photo of Dylan Thomas [taken in a graveyard, up to his waist in autumn leaves, in Laugharne]. I grew up in south Wales and was – I’d have been 17 or 18 – haunted by this amazing photo but did not know anything about the photographer. My book was commissioned in the middle of Covid when I couldn’t go wandering about London as I usually do. From Arnold Circus, where Deakin’s archive was kept, came two gigantic boxes to my Hackney door, like cardboard coffins on special offer from Ikea, containing negatives and contact sheets. The scale was daunting but this proved to be a phenomenal gallery, a window into time.
