A selection of quotes on the work of Marc Atkins

"More haunting are his odd images, reminiscent of Man Ray's, of the human figure photographed in the intimacy of a curtained room. Atkins has worked the light over and over in the darkroom, burning away layers of detail, drawing down a veil that suggests roughed-up archive celluloid, transforming a person into an apparition."
- Tristian Quinn: ‘New Statesman’, Current Affairs Magazine

"The City Atkins sees is a sort of retro-futurist construct, where ancient, all-consuming impoverishment abuts vulgar post-modern consumerism with no apparent contradiction. These are neither emotional nor social images. They are intended to stir uneasy, rootless feelings. They are not designed to prettify, preach or smooth."
- Melanie McGrath: ‘Evening Standard’ Newspaper

"Marc Atkins' Beckett-like scenario suggests the hell of isolation. A man sits at a table in a desolate setting, his head shrouded in cloth blown by a wind machine mounted on a supermarket trolley. A neatly conceived tautology."
- Sarah Kent: ‘Time Out’ London Magazine

"[Atkins] brings in the Blakeaen drive, the all-things-in-the-one-image idea, the single window open, looking out. But always a stalking, of the multiple clarifies of the real, always the beautiful and the disturbing, of un-ease before the light, a strange movement in the shadows at the edge."
- Gareth Evans: ‘Entropy’ Magazine

"Atkins's nudes are always complex: there is a stunning emphasis on sculptural form, but equally there is always a tantalising - actually more teasing - emphasis on the mysterious narrative or scenario to which they are subtended."
- Rod Mengham, Poet, Author, Arts-Writer

"Atkins creates worlds that amplify and project the given atmosphere of place, exploring the hidden hearts, the distilled reconstruction of their atmosphere being performed, lit by time into the camera lens."
- Brian Catling, Performance Artist

"Doors open on rooms in which oblique narrative have played themselves out. The mouth watering precision of Atkins' prints, and the banishment of all unnecessary referents, paradoxically, evoke chambers of imprecision, which refuse to obey the tedium of accepted physical laws."
- Iain Sinclair, Author

"Atkins' vision of London is crepuscular, even when it's broad daylight. There's always a sense that what you can't see is made visible in other forms. The creatures of the night have a transparency that nonetheless casts a shadow. Time past is contained in time future, and time future is contained in time past, as Eliot put it. Marc Atkins' images are evidence that the poetic thought can infect even the most perfectly scientific of discourses."
- Hotshoe International Magazine

"Marc Atkins is a dark-edged photographer of London's hidden places, secret histories and sinister "characters". Noirish, morbid and dramatising, Atkins' photography captures an uban state of mind"
- Jonathan Jones: ‘The Guardian’ Newspaper

"The photographs, infused with the light over London, capture derelict scenes, abandoned pathways split by weeds, the x of two contrails in the sky over grim concrete bunkers. He plays with the paranoia induced by surveillance cameras, becoming himself a kind of freelance surveillance device. All black and white, the photographs reveal contemporary London in the way Stanley Greenberg's Invisible New York opens up that city beneath, between, and around the buildings of its overdeveloped skyline."
- Paul McRandle: ‘The Brain’ Arts Magazine

"I still think Atkins is our real discovery. There are bits of his photos that scare me. He sees things that I have never considered, pieces of undisturbed debris and scatterings of lost thoughts that echo from windows high above. I shiver a bit. My mind takes hold of memories of people I have never seen, strangers, in the future as well as the past."
- Annie Morrand: ‘Rising East’ Magazine