![]() ![]() A daughter who inherited this rage and mixed it with illness and self-pity. He outlines the story: a bullying father who would take umbrage at some perceived transgression of the household rules. One of the most personal reflections concerns a set of photographs taken by Dillon’s aunt. ![]() Like students of a teacher, or colonies of an empire, the relation of these images to each other is their relation to him. But anything can be like anything, at some level. Photograph: Wellcome Collectionĭillon tentatively suggests a connection between the images: many of them seem to capture a blurring and becoming, a mutability between opposing forms. An engraving from Robert Hooke’s Micrographia. The effect is not unlike having a better-read friend take you by the hand and show you around the things he loves. There are abstract patterns captured in the ruins of Hiroshima, dadaist collages, a still from the BBC film production of Samuel Beckett’s Not I – our attention guided always by Dillon’s attraction and fascination. We pass through Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of her niece, pictures of seahorses from a documentary, a scientific drawing of a migraine aura from 1870. We start with a picture from Robert Hooke’s 1665 work Micrographia: a full stop as seen under a microscope, the tiny circle revealed in magnification to be “disfigured, ragged, deformed”. In this work he turns his attention to the notion of affinity itself, through an examination of images that have drawn his gaze. Brian Dillon’s writings have always been marked by affinities – for artworks, for writers, even for particular sentences. ![]() But sometimes more stable, more serious, and more revealing of our ways of engaging with things. What is an affinity? A little like a crush, I suppose, at least at the beginning. Charlotte and Edward may form a stable union but if Edward has an affinity with young Ottilie – ah, well, then all bets are off. In his 1809 novel Elective Affinities, Johann Wolfgang Goethe applied the idea to human relationships. The chemical doctrine of affinity emerged as a way to explain these reactions. Pour on aqua regia, a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids, and the gold dissolves. Why do some things combine and others separate? Add nitric acid to gold, and nothing happens. Photograph: Heritage Images/Heritage Art/Getty Images Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of her niece, one of the works in Affinities. ![]()
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