Butlinland

Butlinland

Rob and Nick Carter
Ben Miller

isbn 978 0 9935135 2 7

28pp148 × 195 mm

Full colour on Essential Silk, with gloss laminated covers and facsimile postcard mounted in vintage photo corners

First printingEdition of 250

£6

Artists Rob and Nick Carter have won acclaim for their series combining huge Cibachrome photographs of found postcards with working neon fragments ‘quoted’ from classic Las Vegas signage.

A new body of work examines postcards more extremely, zooming in on tiny areas using a specially-constructed camera obscura so that the printers’ Ben-Day dots that form the image are enlarged and intensified almost to the point of abstraction.

As a companion to this work, Butlinland presents portraits of all the people turning their face to the camera in a 1970s postcard scene from the bar in Butlins holiday camp, Minehead — almost Brueghelian in its riotous human detail, and weirdly hipster-contemporary in its decor.

Writer and performer (and former theoretical physicist) Ben Miller brings the drama of the scene alive, with texts that imagine and interconnect the biographies and inner monologues of the characters portrayed.