The Beginnings of Eternity

Paddy Summerfield's 'The Beginnings Of Eternity', three years in the making, is his first published colour essay. It starts as an apparent travelogue: traffic and hedges, winter moon and July fields are glimpsed from a moving car. This repeated journey shifts through daylight and changing seasons, looping around local lanes and streets, then entering domestic spaces, into a final garden brilliance. Summerfield has always been a story-teller; in 'The Beginnings Of Eternity' he has a new narrative device - an idiosyncratic colour code that creates the rhythm of the essay, and signals the unfolding of Summerfield's vision of a journey that is both metaphorical and spiritual, towards a peace beyond understanding. After twenty-five years of urging by his friend, photographer John Goto, Summerfield finally acquired a limited, lo-tech digital camera, so limited that the pictures yielded unforeseen (and usually unrepeatable) vagaries of flare, colour shift, distorted perspective, and other oddness. The prismatic shards and the unpredictable effects intensify Summerfield's photography, yet viewers familiar with his work will recognise the composites, the unfocused glimpses, the pattern of echoes that have appeared within his black and white work over decades.