Paddy Summerfield’s Empty Days was published by Dewi Lewis in 2018 and introduced by Patricia Baker-Cassidy. The book gathers 75 duotone plates made in run-down streets and shabby cafés, where the photographer found his pictures among lives that touched him because they reflected his own struggles. In these images he sought to tell their stories and his own, drawn from a world he has described as one he knows, a place that could be anywhere, seen before by everyone.
The photographs turn on large themes—religion, sex, and death—yet among the bleakness of addictions, the ravages of drinking and pills, the book shows no spiritual comfort and no sexual joy, only the search for love in an unloving world and an unsatisfied spiritual longing. Along pavements and pathways, in claustrophobic rooms or open spaces, Summerfield finds isolated figures lost in thought or caught in a flash of emotion. Where no people appear, human traces—an abandoned bicycle, a fallen doll, a tangle of nettles and barbed wire—continue themes of loss and melancholy. However worn down the people and places shown, the pictures offer compassion, not judgement. A handful of troubling portraits punctuate the sequence, intensifying a narrative that remains elusive and incomplete as the photographs lead toward an ending that suggests the possibility of hope.
Summerfield is based in Oxford and trained at Guildford School of Art in the Photography and Film departments. His work has been shown at the ICA, the Barbican, the Serpentine Gallery, and The Photographers’ Gallery, and is held in the collections of the Arts Council and the V&A, as well as in numerous private collections. Empty Days is his third book published by Dewi Lewis; his earlier book Mother and Father (2014) was widely acclaimed and featured in several lists of the Best Photobooks of the Year.
The hardback volume runs 112 pages, measures 220 by 245 millimetres, and contains 75 duotone plates. Also by Paddy Summerfield are Mother and Father, The Holiday Pictures, The Oxford Pictures, The Beginnings of Eternity, and Home Movie.
