The Beginnings Of Eternity

• About the book

Paddy Summerfield's The Beginnings Of Eternity, three years in the making, is his first published colour essay. It starts as an apparent travelogue: traffic and hedges, winter moon and July fields are glimpsed from a moving car. This repeated journey shifts through daylight and changing seasons, looping around local lanes and streets, then entering domestic spaces, into a final garden brilliance. Summerfield has always been a story teller; in The Beginnings Of Eternity he has a new narrative device - an idiosyncratic colour code that creates the rhythm of the essay, and signals the unfolding of Summerfield's vision of a journey that is both metaphorical and spiritual, towards a peace beyond understanding. After twenty five years of urging by his friend, photographer John Goto, Summerfield finally acquired a limited, lo tech digital camera, so limited that the pictures yielded unforeseen (and usually unrepeatable) vagaries of flare, colour shift, distorted perspective, and other oddnes