Theo Zeal: a Friend as Compass, a Wasteland as Eden
“I followed Adam as he foraged on the Isle of Mull. Elsewhere, I looked for people in places where there were none, and kept returning. I placed Adam into this landscape and he made it his own.” These three sentences are the only ones in the book: no sequence titles, no captions, no dates. Nothing to interfere between the photographs and this reading pact.
Theo Zeal studied literature and philosophy in London before turning to photography. While making a short documentary about mudlarks, those scavengers of the Thames mud, he realised it was the still frame that interested him, more than the moving narrative. He is self-taught, through books and YouTube.
A book by American photographer John Gossage, whose own books are works in their own right, conceived with an extreme attention to sequencing and layout, reveals to him the total freedom a photographer has over a sequence. He begins to roam the estuary, east of London, parcels of land with no factories, no houses.
Lyme disease catches up with him during these expeditions: confusion, exhaustion, a feeling of floating outside his own head. British doctors have nothing to offer against symptoms they struggle to manage. Left to his own devices, the photographer goes to visit his oldest friend, Adam, living on Mull, in the Inner Hebrides.
On this wild, sparse island, Adam forages for roots and herbs to flavour his vodka. Theo Zeal follows him without asking anything of him, searching for “how to photograph the feeling of no longer feeling like yourself,” as he later told the Small Photobook Cult podcast. Walking behind someone becomes a method of orientation.
The breakthrough comes by accident, the day the prints from both series, the photographs from Mull and those from the estuary, end up side by side. Adam appears to be foraging amid rubble. This slippage of island into wasteland will become the architecture of the book, whose layout received particular care.
Graphic designer Martina Soffritti tightened the format of the cardboard A4 that Theo Zeal printed at home, alternated paper types from one sequence to the next, produced the cover in a yellow and midnight blue duotone, left the Swiss binding exposed and the spine blank. The volume looks found rather than published, as perishable as a forgotten print.
Adam almost never appears face-on, but from behind, off-centre, or swallowed by the edge of the frame. He is sometimes reduced to a leg, or two hands closed around sea pinks, those small rose-coloured coastal flowers. “I wanted him to look dwarfed by the nature around him,” Theo Zeal tells the same podcast.
A rare frontal image catches him bare-chested, kneeling among flowers, head down. The only digital shot in the book, taken with a borrowed camera after his Pentax 67 broke, shows him tiny at the back of a wood. Remove him from the frame: no scale remains, no landmark, no way out.
The landscape has deliberately been stripped of all geographical markers. “I wanted to create a world where only Adam existed.” One cannot tell whether one is on an island, on the edge of a suburb, or beneath a motorway flyover. Theo Zeal captures involuntary still lifes: a pile of bricks, a white sheet among the grass.
The rest happens in the darkroom. He develops his negatives in caffenol, a mixture of instant coffee and washing soda crystals, ruins many of them, then prints the survivors onto out-of-date paper bought cheaply. This pursuit of chemical accident places him in the lineage of two photographers who made it a method.
First, the British Stephen Gill, who buried his prints in the soil of Hackney Wick so that the place itself might finish the image. Then the American Sally Mann, who keeps on her collodion plates the dust and streaks that others wipe away. Each print becomes a rescue operation: salvaging a legible image from what he has himself damaged.
In keeping with his work, the author’s acknowledgements are of total economy. A single line: “Thank you to Adam for his friendship.” That is also the entire subject.
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