Will Shine by Mark Borthwick
British photographer Mark Borthwick has created a stunning artistic montage for A#4, incorporating photography, poetry and illustration centered around one of his alter egos, the boy Will Shine. The imagery is stark and spiritual, with dream-like sequences of philosophical poetry and prose that explores Mark’s own consciousness and the mythology of youth and love and nature. The first page contains a circular text that reads in a constant cycle, ending and finishing nowhere:
“everything in the back of things is behind the front of things in the heart of things is behind the love of things is [everything]“.
This is followed by a spiderweb-like page of scrawled text, the wanderings of a restless mind – affirmations and existential questioning. Mark Borthwick’s work is certainly akin to that of Jun Takahashi, the sense of introversion yet at the same time the exploration of concepts beyond their own personal identity, like UNDERCOVERISM.
This sequence as a whole is thought provoking and starkly beautiful – an insight into the world of the man himself [real or imaginary] and the stories he has to tell.
