Faust - Schiphorst 2008

I started going to the Avantgarde Festival in 2006, I think. It is still going today but on a much smaller scale.

do dead sheep dream of heaven

This was probably my first serious, attempt at a book cover. It was the cover for jd lennon's 2005, long out of print, collection of flash fiction. But the cover image was one that I probably took as early as 1983. Rather unusually I had full control over the layout.

What is it about the image?

In 2005, I remembered that image that I had taken more than twenty years earlier. We had been walking a southern section of the Pennine Way in Brontë Country near Keighly and as evening neared, we decided that the nearest sensible place to pitch was Ponden Mill. Ponden Mill is a Georgian cotton mill set in typical south Pennine countryside just outside Haworth. After setting up the tent first order of business was always, get something to eat. We had pitched the tent in a glade of trees close to a small tributary of the River Worth, so it was easy to grab some water from there. We boiled up some rice, heated a tin of curry and washed it down with a refreshing cup of tea. Yes, reader you can see what’s coming! A recovery stroll, before turning in, up the lovely stream led some one hundred yards later to the discovery of a dead and rotting sheep caught in amongst a rocky turn in the waters of the tributary. It was a moment where your stomach does a turn and you wonder if you are going survive until morning. What poisons have you inflicted on your body!? 

Unless of course you are a photographer. In which case, you bring your camera up to your eye and start shooting. Which is of course what I did. In those days I was using a Pentax ME Super with a 35mm or 85mm and 25 or 64 ISO slide film. I was doing mostly landscape and urban shooting. If I remember clearly was quite dark because of the fading light and I had to get my feet in the water to get close enough. At that time, I found film and developing quite expensive and so I didn’t really have many frames to waste. Looking through my slides now it appears that I took 3 shots from slightly different angles with different exposures and only 2 were successful.

Creating the cover.

When creating the cover I knew that the image would work with the title of the collection and I hoped that the powerful image would reflect the nature of flash fiction, to create a story in a single shot. The dead sheep isn't presented as a clear documentary image. I tried to use the close crop, the shallow focus, and the cold blue cast make it almost abstract. So that at first glance it could be mistaken for a human face, a sculpture, or something emerging from water. I hope that eventually the eye is drawn to the curled horn and the dark, deteriorating features before the reader recognises what it is they're looking at. I hoped that that delayed recognition would create a feeling of unease for the reader. The title, do dead sheep dream of heaven, seemed to work on several levels. Obviously it immediately echoes Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but instead of asking what makes an artificial being alive, the title asks what happens after an ordinary animal dies. It's simultaneously literary, philosophical, and slightly absurd, which softens what could otherwise be an overwhelmingly grim image. I made a choice not to clean the image up too much, the grain, the slight damage, the muted palette helps, I hope, to make the image like something recovered rather than manufactured, almost a found object that might exist between life and death. 

What happened to jd lennon? 

Many independent literary authors from the early 2000s published one or two acclaimed books through small presses, received reviews like the Barcelona Review quote on the cover, and then disappeared from the public literary scene. Some stopped writing, others changed careers, and many continued writing without seeking publication.