Tales from the Loop: When Restriction Becomes Reality
Chapter Seven: From The Loop, to Tales
Finding Inspiration in Unlikely Places
Inspiration can come at the strangest of times and from the strangest of places.
The self-imposed restrictions I’d set for The Loop — walking the same route, producing only square-cropped, black and white images — had given me a growing body of work: a series of photographs, a framed print, even a limited edition release. The original premise had shown glimpses of what I hoped for, that meaning might eventually emerge through repetition and discipline. And while I had images I truly loved, I was still searching for a deeper connection to tie it all together.
I’d written before about fragments of this journey, but here the threads began to weave into something larger.
Literature and The Loop
Taking a step back from The Loop, I turned to fiction as a way of switching perspective. Having finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Road — a book whose bleak, grey, post-apocalyptic landscapes echoed strangely with my own images — I soon picked up Blood Meridian. Though its world looked very different on the surface, the bleakness remained: a long, arduous journey, a story without heroes, and an ambiguous ending.
I began to see how these narratives paralleled my own project. Like McCarthy’s novels, The Loop felt both endless and unresolved — a ritual of walking and looking that looped back on itself, hinting at meaning without ever offering full clarity. This was the point where The Loop began to feel less like an experiment and more like a story, one that I could begin to call Tales from the Loop.
Collaboration and New Directions
After a few weeks away from walking The Loop — unsure where to take it next but certain there was more to uncover — I returned feeling reinvigorated. I began planning “photowalks” with other photographers whose practices focused on very different things from my own. I wanted to see how they might respond to The Loop.
Conversations also began with a writer, a couple of videographers, and, really, anyone willing to peek into what I was starting to call my “obsessive breakdown.”
But sometimes life has other plans. And in a twist of irony — for a project built on the idea of restriction — I suddenly found myself facing an unwanted, enforced restriction of my own.
Living With Restriction
For years I’ve lived with severe back pain. A motorcycle accident nearly ten years ago left me with a broken C6 vertebra in my neck and ongoing problems with my lower spine (L4-L5, L5-S1). An operation earlier in the year gave me temporary relief, but by early June the pain became unbearable. I couldn’t sit, stand, or walk for more than a few minutes. At times I was stuck lying flat, unable to move at all.
The one silver lining? I had plenty of time to read. (Lying on your back for hours does at least lend itself to books.)
Fictional Narratives and New Sparks
Flat on my back, I worked through Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger, Stella Maris, and Child of God, alongside Orwell’s 1984 and David Gaffney’s Out of the Dark. Together, they sparked the idea that a fictional narrative could expand The Loop. The irony, of course, was that I couldn’t actually do the one thing the project relied on — walk.
After countless hospital visits, rounds of unpronounceable medications, and days of being confined to bed, I eventually managed short spells at my desk. One afternoon, while reworking some older street photography, I decided to glance through The Loop archive. At first it was just cataloguing, preparing for the day I could walk again. But then, with Sunn O)))’s Monoliths & Dimensions vibrating through my headphones, something shifted. Images I had once dismissed began to call back to me, demanding to be re-edited and re-seen.
What began as idle organisation turned into the first sparks of something new: the beginnings of Tales from the Loop.
