Story of a Sunrise: Behind my submission for ‘Stereoscopy is Good for You’

“If I can make the sun rise, I can let the night fall…”

In November 2022, the Stereoscopy is Good for You book from the London Stereoscopic Company (LSC) and its accompanying exhibition at the Proud Galleries in London launched. To my surprise and delight, not only was one of my works featured in the book, but it was also hanging on the wall at the gallery!

The LSC are probably the most singular distributor of all things stereoscopic right now and the Proud Galleries is a prestigious space in the London arts scene, so this is definitely the most my work has been exposed to the world. What better way to start this blog than to talk about that view? Well actually, I debated about this for a while. When the LSC told me that this sunrise in my local town was picked for the book and asked me to provide a caption for it, I decided I didn’t want the story of how I came to be near the ocean at 5am made so visible to a global audience. Instead, I spent the weekend frenziedly writing a poem that captured and veiled those feelings. Now, I feel I can talk about it. Context is always important, and this is my story. It’s not pleasant, but it has, I guess, a happy ending. At least, it’s an ending with some positive resolve.

The raw file for one half of the stereo. Framing is everything in the visual arts, but here you can see everything that was cut out in the finished product to focus on the boats right in front of the sun. Even beyond the sunrise, the landscape carries a certain moodiness that I love.

This shot was taken in the summer, and my life was falling apart. University had not gone well. My grades, for the suffocating standard I forced on myself, weren’t great. The film I was making for my dissertation was crumbling because I shot for the stars and ended up getting caught in a telephone pole. The girl I was somewhat-kinda seeing put my heart through an organ grinder until it was nothing but shreds of muscle. I got through it during term-time by clubbing and developing an appreciation for vodka, but the party was over and all I had was myself, in isolation.

This turmoil over several months manifested in anorexia nervosa, which is an eating disorder that preys on your negative body image to compel you to starve yourself. It’s an insidious, wretched addiction in that it convinces you that all the destructive things you’re doing to yourself is actually a good thing. It does all this without you even knowing you have it – it gets inside you and makes you think that all of its rotten ideas are actually yours. I guess, for me, I was trying to burn away all the parts of myself that I felt were undesirable and unloveable, both physically and emotionally. I didn’t make the connection until a little bit later, but that’s another story.

I was dying. That’s not hyperbole. This disease has done irreparable damage to my body. Nowadays I have it more-or-less managed so long as I’m careful about how much I exert myself for work and I’m able to live as normal a life as someone like me can. But back then I was killing myself, willingly, gladly, because I thought it was better to leave a beautiful, tragic corpse than to continue being me. I ate enough to just about keep me going, but I would often wake up in the middle of the night, my stomach begging me to stop it from cannibalising itself. One morning, it protested a bit too painfully and I relented by having a bowl of cereal. But I couldn’t just go back to sleep. Not with a sack of wheat-based breakfast floating in me for free. I had to earn my rest by burning some of my indulgence off with exercise. An eye for an eye, or something like that; it was a really stupid mind-set I was only half-conscious of at the time.

I got dressed and went for a walk in the morning twilight. Going down the steep hill to reach the town, my only company were my negative thoughts. I was a failure. My first time being in charge of a film and I was ruining it. The first girl I connected with for a long time and I was too naïve to where our relationship was heading. They all rebounded in the silence of the town still sleeping, amplifying, consuming. It was almost dizzying, I stopped being aware that I was walking, or where I was walking to.

The town by the coast. I stood by those two houses when I realised what was unfolding at the beach.

So it was a bit of a surprise that I found myself at the foot of the town’s dinky excuse of a beach, blinded by the sliver of light bleeding out beyond the horizon. The oppressive tones of the nocturnal landscape slowly started filling with colour. Birds sang as they began to stir. It was like the universe in its endless wonder was opening its eyes and bringing the world to life.

The view of the sun from outside the beach.

I couldn’t bare to just be on the fringes of it, so I marched onto the tideless riverbed, not realising how marshy it would be and nearly losing my boots. I didn’t care. I needed to meet the gaze of the universe head-on.

The stereo I submitted is that moment where I stood and let the volcanic blaze of the sun sweep over me. The riverbed sparkled like countless tiny diamonds. The boats were wayfinders into the searing horizon. The fiery mist wrapped it all together. For the first time, maybe in my whole adult life, I felt connected to the universe; its warmth and colour and symphony. And in that reckoning; that moment of purest connection, I found my resolve to carry on.

A shot from directly behind me, facing away from the sunrise. In film, we have a saying where you don't want to 'cross the line' of a scene. That means that to, say, shoot someone looking left after showing them look right at the same thing for the whole scene is disorientating for the viewer. This view, perhaps, is like that: you wouldn't guess that the world was on fire on the other side of the riverbed just by looking at this. But I think there's some value in seeing it. Everything was so still that morning, even down to the water. There's something quite peaceful about this scene, completely at odds with the blazing glory happening just out of shot.

Despite this story, however, I was somewhat surprised that this was picked to be in Stereoscopy is Good for You. I submitted it almost as an afterthought as I focused my energies on my Photoshop stereos which, for me, felt like a truer representation of who I was. I admit, I was initially a little disappointed that they chose this view where I just happened to be in the right place at the time – with nothing else done to it in post – rather than a little slice of space I had spent hours in Photoshop engineering. But once I saw it at the exhibition, printed and framed in mono with the stereo available underneath, I got it. I felt a flicker of that resolve reignite when I looked at it again in 3D. Sometimes artists get in the way of what they’re trying to share by being fancy and expansive. Sometimes the simplest way of expression is the most powerful.

Me with the stereo at the Proud Galleries exhibition. Having pictures taken of me is still a bit of a struggle because of my body image issues. Nothing ever really looks how I'd like it to look and it can sometimes send me into a bit of a spiral. But this one is OK, it captures a bit of the joy of being exhibited, and the photographer is a dear friend whose knows how to use a camera - look at how she got the sunrise's reflection in the OWL ocular!

I was also pleasantly surprised that the poem I wrote for it wasn’t completely awful. The editor asked for a caption, story or poem. I thought that this would mean there would be a lot of poems in there and I wanted to put the work in and not be shown up by only giving them a sentence or two. It turns out I was the only person to submit a poem, which led to my stereo having a page by itself – oops! When I say I wrote the poem over a weekend, I meant I wrote several things that didn’t work and only scrawled the final thing together the night before the deadline. Months later, I came up with those two lines at the start of this post and despaired that it was a far more effective poem than the one I remembered submitting. But actually reading it again at the gallery changed my mind. It’s good, and captures the emotional truth of that moment. Plus there's a bit of T.R. Williams there in how he had a poem printed on the back of his stereo-cards to add context and meaning to his works, so that makes my old Victorian soul happy.

There was a bit of miscommunication, though, and the editors believed the piece’s title was its first line. These things happen! But the poem is not just about that experience on the riverbed: it’s also about stereoscopy and my search for depth. In fact, it contains a couple of my favourite self-written wordplays. Leave a comment if you think you’ve found them!

That’s the story of the sunrise that gave me the resolve to carry on with this whole silly affair we call ‘life.’ Of course, it’s not as straightforward as that being the moment where I was able to manage my anorexia. It’s too complicated a disease for such a fairy-tale ending. But it was a turning point. Things got worse, but they’ve now gotten better. Or at least, as good as it can be, and that’s precious. It’s a moment I would have probably written off as unimportant if I didn’t shoot it in stereo and be reminded of its radiance when I saw it again in 3D. That’s the power of stereoscopy as the medium of immersive empathy.

If you happen to ever pick up the book or attend the exhibition, take a moment to look at the sunrise. You’ll see the world through my eyes regain its colour, and maybe you’ll feel a shade of the hope I did.

Stereoscopy is Good for You is available from the London Stereoscopic Company online shop: https://shop.londonstereo.com/stereoscopy-is-good-for-you-1.html

Tickets to the Stereoscopy is Good for You exhibition can be bought from the Proud Galleries online shop: https://proudgalleries.com/collections/exhibition-tickets/products/stereoscopy-is-good-for-you-life-in-3-d-2023