THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S GRIMOIRE

Occult Strategies for Visionary Photographers

Become A Visionary Photographer

Have you ever photographed something you couldn't explain? A ludicrous coincidence? Something uncanny? You are not alone. 

The Photographer's Grimoire is the world's first practical manual for photography as occult practice.

Written over seven years, it gives those various experiences of photographic "woo-woo" a working framework. A field guide to the strange synchronicities that can appear in your images. This isn't a memoir about one photographer's trippy adventures. It's a toolkit for having your own.

The World's First Photographer's Grimoire

Drawing on Chaos Magic, Zen philosophy, Celtic Shamanism, Gnosticism, and photographic theory, Thompson builds a practical framework for understanding photography as occult practice. Grounded in his own empirical experience as a working photographer and cunning man. The result is unlike any existing photography book or occult text: part field manual, part philosophical investigation. 

BOOK SPECS

  • 203mm x 150mm

  • 166 pages

  • Hardback cover

  • Wicotex Magic cloth

  • Debossed gold foil cover text

  • Offset printed by KOPA

  • Designed by Tiffany Jones / Overlapse Publishing

For Who Does This Book Serve?

The Photographer's Grimoire is for anyone who has taken a photograph that raised a question they couldn't answer. It takes that experience seriously, gives it a language, and hands you a set of tools, rituals, tasks, and a framework for reading your own results. 

If you are a street photographer, documentary photographer or photojournalist this book is for you. I hope it changes the way our work is perceived forever. 

Award Winning Designer 

Designed by Tiffany Jones of Overlapse Publishing, The Photographer's Grimoire is a beautiful object in its own right. An artefact to be used, marked up, and returned to.

A man in a black coat stands on a rocky beach, taking a photo with his camera of the calm ocean and sky at dusk or dawn.

Award Winning Photographer

Edward Thompson is a British documentary photographer whose work has featured in National Geographic Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine and The Guardian. 

His photographs have been exhibited at The Saatchi Gallery, Somerset House and at international photo-festivals in the U.K, France, Finland, Norway, and Spain. 

He has published five photography books since 2011. These are in the collections of The National Art Library, The Bishopsgate Institute, The Museum of London, The Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and The Devil’s Museum, Lithuania.

He's won a Sony World Photo Award, A Fuji Film Distinction Award, and The Special Prize at The Magnum Photo / Ideastap Award. 

“Edward is the most single minded photographer. He probably thinks about photography all the time, like a trainspotter, but a photographer.

He’d take a photograph whilst falling out of a moving vehicle.”

Germaine Greer