Opening the archives
Welcome – and thank you for visiting Held Up To Light. It feels like a small but powerful moment to write these first words and open the doors to a project that has been quietly building for over two decades. The images presented here represent the beginnings of something I’ve long wanted to share.
Over the past 25 years, I’ve been amassing a personal archive of illustrated books. These are not rare in the traditional sense, but each is precious in its own way - old educational manuals, art catalogues, encyclopaedias, photographic surveys, books discarded by libraries, or discovered in vintage markets across cities and years.
From the beginning, I wasn’t drawn to the books as complete works but to the images they contained - images that held a particular kind of resonance: strange, beguiling, beautiful, or absurd.
The archive has grown into something quite vast: hundreds of books, thousands of images, and countless hours spent sifting, browsing, and selecting.
What’s shared here is only the result of an intense and deeply subjective form of editing. For every image that becomes a finished piece, there are hundreds more that have been looked at under different lights, held at arm's length, rotated, reversed, and finally paired.
The first viewer of these discovered illusions is always me - and I treasure the sense of surprise, joy, and often bafflement they offer.
Alongside the natural enjoyment, the act of rigorous selection has always been central. I’m not interested in making quick graphic contrasts or simplistic juxtapositions.
What I search for are more elusive alignments - moments when two entirely unrelated images converge and a new visual space opens up: part memory, part hallucination, part optical illusion.
When something truly resonates, I cut the page carefully, mark it, and archive it. Suspension file boxes stack up beside my workspace, each one labelled by theme, or book title. There are drawers filled with fragments, delicate piles of paper wrapped in tissue, and small stacks of potentials, waiting to be seen again.
What I’m sharing here is not a finished archive, but a living one. These images reflect both a visual history of printed ephemera and a personal practice shaped by time, chance, and curiosity.
New works will be added regularly - some released as limited editions, others shared through essays or glimpses into the process. My hope is that this space becomes a place for moments of curiosity, connection and visual resonance.
It’s a thrill to finally be sharing these with you.
Thank you for looking.
Held Up To Light is now live.
