Timothy Prus on The Whale’s Eyelash

Throughout the morning, two art dealers come and go. They have toured small art shows and antique roadshows, and now pitch up with some lost photography collection and a story to tell, in the hope Prus might fancy adding to the archive. They’re treated with the knockabout warmth of old friends – indeed, Prus has known them for 25 years or so each. But then, when money is briefly talked of, it’s very quickly apparent a serious businessman is at work here. And so, as a result, Prus knows and discusses photography in a way very few of us do. “Of course,” he says at one point, “I’ve long been in awe of 19th century chromo-lithography, daguerreotypes and heliogravure techniques, which are all but lost.” To which most of us can only nod and agree.

The impression one gets is that here is a man with a genuinely, unpretentious belief in old things. “I think we should be very careful of using old practices today, because they can very quickly become a kind of kitsch, too self-conscious and retro,” he says. “Some countries have intertwined older techniques with their sense of nationhood and nostalgia. I’ve seen some really dismal things; so much stuff just descends into upper crap. We just can’t compare to the quality of book making from the 19th century.”

While we talk, Milli busies herself with a mushroom risotto, made at her father’s request. Prus smokes as he talks, often stubbing a Marlborough Light out just as it’s lit so he can illustrate a point, before lighting up another. She subtly places a bottle of wine in his vicinity. He notices it with elaborate surprise before popping the cork. He barely breaks flow as he pushes a large glass across the table.

The three witches, from the opening of Shakespeare’s MacBeth, acted as inspiration for the book, he says. “How does it go Milli?” he calls. “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble,” she shouts back, as she’s stirring the risotto. This is the way in to The Whale’s Eyelash. It follows the format of MacBeth’s tragic demise, a story of hubris and ambition for all of mankind, made up of all the things our eye is incapable of seeing: “The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be, Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.”

Tom Seymour

Tom Seymour is an Associate Editor at The Art Newspaper and an Associate Lecturer at London College of Communication. His words have been published in The Guardian, The Observer, The New York Times, Financial Times, Wallpaper* and The Telegraph. He has won Writer of the Year and Specialist Writer of the year on three separate occassions at the PPA Awards for his work with The Royal Photographic Society.