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.

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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 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. 

  • Chapter One. A childhood photograph of a mysterious stick circle found deep in a hurricane-flattened wood sets the tone for a chapter that reframes street photography as active spellcraft. Drawing on Henri Cartier-Bresson, Zen philosophy, and a genuinely uncanny AI-generated séance with HCB himself, Thompson lays out the core practice at the heart of the book: magical thinking, "no-mind," and the art of willing a moment into being before the shutter ever clicks.

  • Chapter Two. Every magical tradition has its lone wizard working outside the coven, and Thompson argues the documentary photographer is exactly that: a solo practitioner who must infiltrate, embed, and vanish into a world in order to truly see it. This chapter is a manifesto for working alone. Why company kills the encounter, why staged "documentary" photography is a lesser magic, and why sitting at the bar by yourself is how the real story begins.

  • Chapter Three. The most confessional and wide-ranging chapter in the book, cataloguing every altered state Thompson has used, deliberately or by accident, to unlock the photographic trance. Excitatory highs (visual overload, anxiety, Dalí's paranoiac-critical method), calm states (meditation, hangovers, love), and accidental trances (doom-scrolling, motorway driving, video games) are all mapped as routes to the same destination: no-mind, and the vivid seeing that comes with it.

  • Chapter Four. The working grimoire proper: a hands-on toolkit of rituals, games, and thought experiments — from Sigil Magic to Alchemy to "The Stranger" — designed to be performed with nothing but a camera. Framed by a sharp distinction between High Magic (self-transformation) and Low Magic (fame and fortune), this chapter hands the reader Thompson's own invented system, Synchromancy, as a set of exercises to actually go out and practice.

  • Chapter Five. The payoff. A genuinely original taxonomy of the strange coincidences and synchronicities that start happening once you photograph this way. Things that started happening to the author over 25 years ago when he gave himself over utterly to photography. Synchro-Tempus, Synchro-Anachro, Synchro-Adtractus, Synchro-Fabula, Synchro-Archetypus. Five categories that give language to the "photographic woo-woo" every serious photographer has felt but never had a name for.

  • Chapter Six. The grimoire closes on the question underneath everything: does any of this require belief to work? Weaving in Chaos Magic, Austin Osman Spare's sigil practice, and a lifetime of choosing the stranger, more magical path, Thompson lands on a final argument. Photographing is the ritual.