To be a cloud; a photograph. Droplets hovering on air, softening into paper. Both are symbols of mobility, dreams and mood. Both visual delights with a tousled history of allegory and wonder, ever-changing, everywhere.

Guy Archard’s latest photobook Cumulus is a concise yet heady accumulation of cloud portraits in which he fixes and materializes that which sashays and drifts overhead. He restores and celebrates what a contemporary excess of photographs denies: the rarity and preciousness of the isolated form. He reminds us that the formation of a cloud, watching it traverse the sky, remains as subtle and magic as a print appearing in the developer tray.

Published by Y-Junction as a handcrafted limited edition of 200 copies, the book folds out concertina-style to reveal nineteen panels of individual giclee prints tipped-in without glue. Clouds shapeshift from swollen greys to lithe beiges and flush pinks, their size and orientation also fluctuating with each page-turn. Archard uses different methods of copying and printing on textured paper to fragment and distort each cloud’s personality, sometimes letting the ink run out as reflection on instability and a gradual decline into disorder. The text, heat foiled onto the covers, is at once deep and elevated.

As with his first photobook Almost (Bemojake, 2013), Archard’s work begins in an everyday space laden with personal memories. With Cumulus, he draws us in to appreciating the many metaphors between clouds and photography. That photographs of clouds are photographs of water but in a different form. That like a photograph, clouds are incapable of supporting weight or holding anything up. That even with careful study they will always hold something out of reach.

Irrespective of their form, we can find meaning in clouds and photographs, and we can project meanings onto their surfaces. In Cumulus, Archard beholds us to the enchanted and frolicsome cloud who has no ending and no home.

Odette England, 2022