TOKYO-2017

The Bumforth Manor Archive

  • Photographer
    Nick Simpson

In this series I make work as my fictitious great grandfather, the Victorian eccentric, inventor and photographic pioneer, Samuel Heracles Gascoigne-Simpson (1839-1910). All the pictures are made from scratch in my studio in East London and captured on an 19th century view camera and lens. The story is as follows;- The pictures gathered here are just a few from a large number of glass plates discovered in the attic of a house belonging to an aged relative of mine who died in 1988.  The Gascoigne-Simpson family owned Bumforth Manor, a crumbling draughty pile of dubious artistic merit near Grantham in Lincolnshire for over five generations. These plates have languished undiscovered for over a hundred years in a lead-lined oak chest bearing the initials S.H.G.S. They constitute the only surviving work of my great grandfather, the Victorian eccentric, amateur inventor and photographer; -Samuel Heracles Gascoigne-Simpson (1839-1910). From the early 1860's up until his death in 1910, the family seat of Bumforth Manor in rural Lincolnshire, England, was Gascoigne Simpson's studio and laboratory;- Friends, relations, servants, local land owners, dignitaries, land workers, clergy, eccentrics, oddballs and degenerates (sometimes even against their will) all found themselves clamped into place in his drawing room studio under the unblinking glare of his 'brass eye' .